


Later Still

by mysteryoflovemyway



Series: Later Still [1]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternative Lifestyles, Angst, Angst and Feels, Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, Canon Bisexual Character, Elio's POV, Gay, Gay Male Character, Italy, M/M, Multi, POV First Person, POV Male Character, POV Original Character, Post-Canon, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Summer, Summer Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-03-24 07:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 26,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13805952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysteryoflovemyway/pseuds/mysteryoflovemyway
Summary: This Call Me By Your Name fic is set in the summer after the film (and most of the novel) takes place. Oliver has brought his fiancé, Jenny, to meet The Perlmans, without Elio’s knowledge that they were coming. Oliver and Elio have spoken only a few times since that one phone call over winter break, breaking the news of his engagement. Elio has graduated high school and is spending his last summer with his parents back at the villa before he starts college. Oliver’s re-entrance into Elio’s life - along with that of Jenny - complicates things.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I expanded on things that happened in the film (that did not happen in the novel), and vice versa. I also made up things, added things, etc etc etc. This is fan fiction, obviously, so I changed things to be the way I wanted it. ALSO I am in no way trying to replicate André Aciman’s fantastic writing as that cannot be done - I am simply trying to recreate the atmosphere of the film and novel using my own writing style and insight into the characters created by Aciman, and brought to life so perfectly by Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, and the rest of the cast.

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN ITALY

SUMMER 1984 

He wasn’t supposed to come back.

Not this soon, which was really not soon enough. Which was a year too long. He wasn’t supposed to come back, though I ached for the day his tan skin, his blue eyes, his worn espadrilles were standing in front me again.

They were back, so suddenly and so differently, accompanied by pale freckled arms, brown eyes, and thick braided sandals. Her lips were pink and her hair was dark and wild, and the ring on her finger silenced me immediately as she offered her hand. I looked at him when she introduced herself with a simple name that I wished were mine, just so he might say it everyday the way he used to say his own. The way I used to say mine.

“Oliver never stops talking about this place,” she says now, eyes bright and alive. He stares at me from behind, through his sunglasses, and I am forced to smile back at her like I don’t have ten thousand words to say to him on the tip of my tongue. Like it hasn’t been an entire year since I’ve seen him. Like it hasn’t been six months since they’ve been engaged. Like my entire world isn’t in shambles beneath his radiant blue sky.

I glance around, hoping maybe something might call for me, to beckon me away, to summon me to another hell that might be slightly cooler than this one. Instead, she leans back into him, her head on his chest as if she is the only one to ever do that. She has no idea how badly I want to insist that she not touch him, not speak to him, not do anything that he and I once did. How could someone else have him so obviously when he was mine so insatiably only a year before, and years and years after? How could he always be mine in theory, and yet be someone else’s in real existence?

Finally, he nudges her away so he can sit down at the table. I watch him take off his sunglasses and look at me, killing me further with each passing second.

“Won’t you give me a grand tour, Elio?” she asks. She sits down next to him and I stand two feet away, fighting anger. The clouds have masked the sun but I’m drowning in his heat. “I’d love to explore after we eat.”

“Oliver knows his way around,” I hear myself saying, barely looking at him. His name comes out in a whisper. I hadn’t uttered it aloud in weeks.

“Not as well as you, I bet. Come with us,” she maintains then, glancing back at him. She smiles again—genuine, unknowing. I stare at her lips for several seconds in silence, thinking of Oliver kissing them, thinking of Oliver touching them and beyond.

“Surely you’re not busy,” Oliver adds and it’s not even a question. I notice that he isn’t looking at me, not like how he used to. Now he looks at me like we’ve only briefly met before. It kills me a little bit more each time I dare a peek and soak up more of his sun.

“Jen has heard enough of my local commentary—you know much more than me.”

And yet, I know nothing at all.

“I’m dying to see the orchard. Oliver has missed it, haven’t you?” She reaches back and catches his chin in her palm, sharing something between them that I’ll never have again. “You should just hear the way he raves about his ‘favorite summer on the Italian Riviera’.”

 _Don’t tell me that_ , I want to say. _Don’t tell me things I know better than you ever will. Don’t parade his being around in front of me, his essence, his everything that you get to be with everyday. Don’t taunt me with a him that is without me._

“Mafalda!” Oliver looks relieved when she steps into the garden with a tray of his once precious apricot juice.

“ _Ulliva_ ,” she recites in the heavy accent he probably had forgotten. “ _Ciao_.”

“Ciao!” he says, only to me it sounds like _later_.

I want to bury my face in his ocean of laters. To smell his aftershave of unspoken laters. To bathe in his sweat of later, and later, and later still.

That dreaded _later_. I would give every “later” from last summer to hear him say it again. To hear him hesitate before tossing it into the air between us. Every later, or blasé glance, or wave of the hand most often reserved for people he could not care less about. I’d take it all for one more time, one more sweet utterance of that damned _later_.

“Your parents are so nice,” Jenny comments as Oliver continues droning on to Mafalda, ignoring us—ignoring me—so blatantly I almost consider yelling right in his face. But I don’t, looking at her with as much honest interest as I can muster. “Are they not joining us?”

They had been the ones to greet Oliver and Jenny at the door. They hadn’t bothered to tell me we would have visitors—these very specific visitors—maybe for better, but probably and most likely for the worse. It was much worse coming downstairs for lunch with my parents and finding my Oliver standing in the foyer with a girl that could have only been brought here by him. To see my mother and my father move away, to flee into the kitchen so swiftly, leaving too much space for me to fill up with uncertain steps and deep breaths and no words that actually held a million. Oliver had cut right to the chase, leading Jenny out to the back patio. I had trailed along like a begging puppy, catching a glimpse of my parents talking with their backs to us.

“They wouldn’t miss a date with _la movie star_ ,” I answer with a smirk that creases sad around the edges.

“My mother’s very endearing term for Oliver,” I say, offhanded, when she offers a polite but impersonal chuckle. She looks at him again, as do I, and I know he has grown even more into the _la movie star_ persona without me.

Jenny tugs at the hem of her a dress, no doubt a nervous tick that Oliver finds charming. Her eyes scan the peach, apricot, and cherry trees surrounding us. “I wish I could have grown up in a place like this.”

“And where did you grow up?” I ask, not because I want to know, but because I want him to see me making an effort to know her. I want him to see everything.

Mafalda has retreated back inside by now and Oliver swivels back toward us, his golden hair catching the slight breeze. I am entranced and repulsed, all at the same time, remembering my hands in that hair, my fingers curling softly into his scalp. He closes his eyes for a moment and I know he’s remembering it just the same.

“Upstate New York, nothing special,” Jenny has said, though it doesn’t register until a few too many seconds have passed. Oliver opens his eyes and mine snap back to her gaze as it rests easily on me. She has beautiful owl-like eyes, big and wandering, and I wonder if the longing in mine reflects back at her as painfully as it does inside myself. If it does, she doesn’t acknowledge it, doesn’t understand it—could never understand it. No one could but him.

“She’s modest,” Oliver muses. He runs his hand down the length of her arm and I itch to grab it away and hold it to my skin instead. “She grew up with Kennedys and Vanderbilts and the like. A real New England catch.”

“Hardly.” She blushes. “I’m not some blue blood, old money debutante. I don’t even own a white dress or boat shoes, I swear. Don’t listen to him, Elio.”

“Oh, I never listen to him,” I tell her and this time I stare right into his eyes. I feel my face grow hot once again but he is the first to break my gaze. I look away, too, as my parents grace us with their long awaited presence on the terrace. I sit between my mother and Oliver, unsure whether I want to kill or be killed by him at any given moment over the next hour or so. I cannot stand so much time together with all of them, all so together that even a stolen glance will be nothing. Not with her right there. Not with that ring right there. Not with Oliver absolutely slaughtering every memory I have of him with bright hot rage. I am so mad at him that it makes me want him even more, so close, so much, so everything. I want his everything that somehow belongs to her in a way she doesn’t even know. How could she ever know?

How could anyone ever know?

“What do you do, Jennifer?” my mother asks then, gesturing with her fork when our plates have been set before us. She could have asked her more but I have little attention toward anyone but Oliver. “Something with publishing, yes?”

“Jenny, please.” She blushes and takes a tiny bite of pasta, barely coiling it around her fork, so American. “And yes, I work in advertising for Random House.”

I tune out their conversation immediately when Oliver speaks, his face leaning toward my father’s, away from mine. I inch closer, if only to show Oliver that I am never not listening to him.

“Where’s the me of this summer?” he asks my father with a glance around the table as if he will find the answer between the basket of fresh olive bread and the bottle of red wine. “I hadn’t heard who you had chosen. Or perhaps my opinion didn’t matter in the selection process.” At this, his eyes find mine and he laughs into his chest like it’s a secret.

God, that laugh. I could spend hours wrapped inside it.

My father laughs too. “You left us with quite a good pool of successors to pick through. I think you’ll be happy to hear who we chose—Pauline Bethesda. She was two years behind you, I believe. She arrives in three weeks.”

Oliver nods slowly with a broad smile. “Pauline’s a good one, Pro. She’ll do swimmingly, I’m sure of it.”

“Swimmingly?” I poke into their exchange while taking a long sip of my wine—which Oliver definitely notices. “Where does a word like that come from?”

“Not apricot all over again. You’ve got Elio in on it now, huh, Pro?” Oliver sighs but below the table his foot nudges mine and my body goes stiff, and then numb with recollected pleasure, though I am still mad at him.

“Elio’s mind has grown as much as yours has in a year, Oliver,” my father says without any knowledge of what has just occurred, though he could easily infer. “He graduated with honors and is off to university in the fall.”

Oliver finally manages to turn and face me fully, impressed at the very least. “That’s right. And you’ll be studying—No, let me guess—literature.”

He beams, too bright and too perfect and too everything—too Oliver. And I become too Elio, unable to be all that mad at him when he does that. Unable to do anything but nod because the words I have are all for him, and only him, and do not come when he beckons them. Because my words, his words, our words only exist when it is just us two. I don’t know when it will be just us two again. Minutes, hours, days—I can only nod until then.

I am near silent the rest of lunch, caught between stealing long glances at Oliver and agreeing with my mother as she drones on about my senior year. Embarrassment creeps into my face on every other word as she lists my achievements and accolades, which are not lost on Oliver. We had spoken on the phone, three months ago, briefly, and I had told him that one of my essays had been chosen to be sent off to an American literary magazine based out of Washington, D.C. He had never heard of the magazine, but promised he would seek out a copy for me. We had talked then like distant friends, no mention of his visit, and it is only now that I wish I hadn’t lumped that conversation into the others. Now I only remembered a few details, mainly because it hadn’t seemed important at the time. More of an obligation of his, to check up every once and a while, to confer with my parents. To prove to me that he still went about living without me. That I was just a small part of his life, and not the all-consuming entirety of it that he was to mine.

Mafalda clears the table sometime later, when my parents have moved over by the pool, smoking cigarettes and reading. When Jenny excuses herself to the bathroom. When it’s been two excruciating minutes and Oliver suggests, loud enough for my parents to hear, that I show him what new project Anchise has taken to down by the river. My father takes off his glasses, pretending—or not—to not notice as we get up from the table and walk, strides matching, around the side of the house. Away from them, and everyone else. Alone.

We walk several steps in quiet and I make a point to stop when we near the gate, the road, everywhere beyond. Everywhere that I showed him. Everywhere that holds a piece of him and me, of us.

He clears his throat, arching his neck up toward the sky. “I’ve missed you,” he tells me. His eyes are squinted, still looking up toward the sun, his sunglasses useless as they hang from his shirt collar. His fingers curl at his sides.

“Have you?”

I am tempted to touch him, every part of him. To lose myself in his oasis. But something stops me—Jenny, footsteps echoing across the front porch. Hair pulled back and a canvas tote bag swinging from the crook of her elbow. Oliver slips on his sunglasses then and looks to her, all but dismissing me in the wake of her unwanted yet unavoidable interruption.

“You’re not going off to explore without me, are you?” She smiles and grabs Oliver’s hand. “Do we drive?”

They both look to me and I stagger backwards as if such a question has forced a bullet in my chest. Oliver knows much better.

“ _Americani_ ,” I mutter, making sure they hear me as I turn back for the bikes. They both laugh loudly, vibrating across the lawn, though Oliver’s is the only one I hear.

When I push over two bikes for them and go back for a third for myself, his laugh continues to rush through me, despite the easy peacefulness surrounding us as we climb on and head out through the front gate. I, in front, and Oliver in back. Miles and miles between us. I don’t know if we’ll ever truly be close again.

“To the bookstore, Elio,” he calls out when we reach the piazza.

Again, his _later_ stills in my mind.

_To the bookstore, Elio. Later._

_To everywhere and nowhere, Oliver. To anywhere—only with you,_ I would say back.

_Only you._


	2. Chapter 2

The bookstore is busy for a weekday, so I hang back as Jenny sticks her head inside. Oliver is beside her, but his interest is waning, I can tell.

“Aren’t you coming in?”

She looks from him to me and Oliver shakes his head for the both of us. She shrugs, eyes already skimming the works of Shakespeare and the like when she steps inside. We watch her pick up a Tolkien from a front-facing shelf instead, already lost to the Middle Earth inside.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I blurt out once she has disappeared completely into the bookstore; the bookstore Marzia loves, the bookstore Oliver’s books still sit in, in a giant display case with his signature all over them. I’d gone in maybe seventeen times since last summer just to smell them, as if maybe his scent still lingered there like it did in our room.

“Doing what?” He inches closer to me but ducks his head.

“Don’t do that,” I say but smile anyway, despite everything since he has showed up here with her and matching luggage and a hug for my parents but not for me. Not in front of her. Not yet.

“I should’ve told you we were coming.” He leans back against the wall, now too far away from me again. The sun beats down on his forehead, sweat starting to form there. There was a time when I made him sweat, made him ache, made him feel, made him boil—maybe that time would come again, but I had given up hoping, even while he looks over at me, all over me, and sighs so deeply I’d swear it was almost a yearning moan.

 _You’ll kill me if you stop_ , echoes in my mind.

“You should’ve told me a lot of things.” It comes out in a whisper, so weak and childlike. “Does she know about us?”

“Of course not.”

It stings and he shies away, realizing his harshness, his obviousness, his aversion, his seeming disgust. But I’d give anything to disgust him further, though I know in all honesty that that’s not what he feels toward me.

“Right.” I exhale slowly. “That’s smart of you. Because it’s not like my parents know or anything.”

Oliver narrows his eyes. “Elio, please.” He looks upward, anything to not be caught in my enduring stare. His hands go to his hair, trying to squelch his thoughts that could only be of me, as mine are only of him.

“How long are you staying?” I try instead after a few moments pass, easing myself into a more appropriate public discussion.

“Two weeks.”

I suck in a breath and let out a low whistle. “Long time.”

“Not long enough.” He casts a sidelong glance at me before proceeding to pull out a pack of cigarettes. He takes a few steps and lights one, smoke swirling into the tame wind around us. I take a few steps to join him, looking up to his eyes that find mine, on instinct. Him and I, forever alive on impatient instinct.

_How can you say that one second and the next be all about her, leaving me witness to heartbreak, over and over? How can you love me, and then lie to her, to everyone else? How can you toss us about like you’re constantly thinking about it all, too, but not want to actually say anything real about it?_

As always, thoughts spin around in my head, furious and unsound, hoping for a chance at life above the surface. At times I vocalize them. But it’s only been hours since he’s arrived. The time is always there, and yet never there. How can I speak to him—truly speak to the Oliver I know—when the Oliver she knows seems to exist much more outwardly? I never want my Oliver to be seen, heard, loved by everyone else, but still I ache for the chance that maybe it could be. It’s unsettling at the very least that I have to sit idly by waiting for him to return, when I am always merely Elio all the time. Marzia’s Elio. My parents’ Elio. Everyone’s Elio.

But most of all, his Elio—his Oliver. Interchangeable. One. The same.

“You remember Chiara, I’m sure,” I say after he wordlessly passes me the cigarette. He gives a slight nod, squinting into the sun again, with the damned sunglasses back on his collar.

“She’s seeing this guy from Paris.” I take a drag. “They seem really good together, you know? Marzia talks about them sometimes—like she wishes she was apart of it, or something. It’s a fucking waste, really.”

“Marzia?”

He doesn’t care if I notice the crack in his voice, shifting his stance to better see my face, my reaction, my smirk.

“She comes around still. Sometimes. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you don’t want me to know?” His face seems flushed now and I follow up with another smirk for glorious, unadulterated adolescent measure.

“Which do you prefer, Oliver?”

He goes silent and takes the cigarette back, fingers brushing mine so deliberately that my smirk grows into a full-blown grin. He notices, too—of course he does—and knocks my shoulder. Like he used to do. Like _we_ used to do.

“I’m going to find Jenny.” The cigarette gets thrown to the ground and crushed beneath his beloved espadrilles.

He grabs my shoulder when I don’t say anything. “Look, we’ll talk, okay? Just not here. Not right now.”  
            

“So, later, then?” I challenge.

A hint of a smirk passes over his face. “Yes, later.”

He starts past me, espadrilles slapping the ground like they are mocking me. Everything seems to be of his accord, on his time, of his convenience. I stay put, letting him walk away from me once more. Letting him see that his hold on me is still there, yet has faded with time—time he took with him when he left. Waiting for sweet recovery, should he choose it. I had already chosen it, and perhaps, in this visit—he did, too, in some way or another.

Exasperation evident, his jaw clenched, he pads back to me and touches my shoulder again. A playful exchange from the outside looking in.

“ _Please_ ,” he whispers, leaning his head down into my gaze.

I say nothing.

“I’m going to find Jenny,” he repeats, still touching my shoulder, fingerprints burning through my t-shirt. White hot summer envelops him.

“Aren’t you coming, Elio?” he adds pointedly. He lets go of me too soon, much too soon, and I wither away into the afternoon breeze that could have only been manifested by him. He was everything that made me move, and everything that made me stay. I finally trailed after him inside the bookstore, where Jenny was buying a stack of classic books translated into Italian.

“For the culture,” she explains. “Is that stupid?”

Oliver shakes his head before I can say a word. “It’s very insightful. Romantic, even. The Italian ways and the dialect of such a rich nation, the well known words becoming distant but somehow welcoming strangers as you begin to decipher them and see them in a new way. It’s really very purposeful. But that’s just my take, I guess. What do you think, Elio?”

Her eyes are patient and kind, interested. She’s a pure intellectual of many sorts, her mind a beautiful place where he takes up more space than he deserves. She is the girl his parents—whoever they are—always wanted him to marry. She is the American dream.

His eyes are darkly hopeful, restrained, and something else— craving. Searching. They are searching for me, only me, but they settle on her for now. She is too nice to say no to. She is the one from all the chocolate-box novels and movies and songs and I am simply the one from the back of his mind. Forever lingering there.

They are still looking at me with their different eyes, somehow in sync for the moment, and I am blushing, struggling to say something, anything.

“ _Americani_ ,” I say finally, wait for their gracious laughter, and head back outside where I can only breathe for so long without needing to be near him again, harvesting his air. I glance into those eyes again, hoping I might find something else—confirmation, maybe. _I love you, Elio_ , maybe.

But maybe I don’t see an _I love, you, Jenny_ , either.

On the way back to the villa, I pedal slowly behind them, just so I can see all of him, how he interacts with her, and know for absolutely positive that it is nothing like us.


	3. Chapter 3

The deep cool sweat of the evening came after an agonizing late afternoon of small talk with Jenny in the orchard, picking apricots and peaches and cherries for Mafalda. Oliver was absent, helping my father reorganize his office as if that was the entire reason for his visit. When we had gotten back to the villa, I had been called to move into the room I had occupied last summer, and a harrowing sense of déjà vu set in, getting my bedroom— _our_ bedroom—ready once again for Oliver’s stay. Mafalda had complained of my room being too small for both Oliver and Jenny, perhaps unaware—or not—how comfortably it could hold two bodies, two lovers, two worlds.

Only a year ago that had been Oliver and me.

Now it was Oliver and Jenny, his books and notes strewn across my nightstand and on my floor, her dresses and sunhats hanging in my wardrobe. Mafalda clucked her tongue at the three of us sharing a bathroom, but there was no other way around it. The villa was vast and spacious where it counted, but small and domestic where it actually mattered most. I had gotten used to the tiny bedroom of summers past, though now it would feel more lonely despite the presence of not one, but two, people just on the other side of the wall. It was almost like a young couple sharing an apartment with the husband’s kid brother—in the eyes of the innocent.

Though, whose eyes were those anymore? It had been a long few months after he had left, all the ups and downs of losing Oliver, in all but plain sight of more than just my parents. It had been an even longer few months after his phone call over winter break. I was sure Mafalda at least knew, had probably always known, when I thought Oliver and I to be so careful.

My parents were a cruel species, allowing all of this to happen, though I cursed myself for giving them more blame than Oliver. Damn the sweet scent of Oliver that unfurled in my lungs and cast a spell every time he was in the room. One look and I wilted, over and over.

Did he do the same? Did his toes curl at the sight of me? Did his ears redden at the sound of me? I had an idea, a wish, a slight edge. But I didn’t know anymore. He had always been better at hiding it than me. Especially when he was so far away in the office with my father, avoiding me again.

Jenny eventually goes up to take a nap before dinner, leaving me to lounge about on the sofa while my mother watches a soap opera and smokes beside me. I consider pacing the outside of the office, or offering my assistance in arranging slides, but it’s much too obvious.

“Come, Elio,” my mother murmurs when she notices me staring off into nowhere—the dust in the air, the water dripping from the plants outside, the chipping paint on the window panes. “Are you all right, _mon fils_?”

I want to laugh, absurd and loud. I only bite my lip in frustration, always unable to handle my internal struggle with a straight face. I can fool everyone and no one.

“Why is he back?” I say but it barely comes out. I crane my neck away from her touch but she is already wrapping me into her arms, kissing my forehead. “With _her_?”

“We knew this would be hard for you,” she says. She moves to comb her fingers through my hair, ever the maternal instinct kicking in. “We didn’t want you obsessing over it.”

“And I’m not now?”

“Elio,” she coos. “Just for two weeks, okay?” She then says something in French along the lines of, _I know you still feel strongly for him, but he wanted to see us again. We’re important to him—you, included. How could we say no?_

I want to argue but I can’t. There is no way of telling her how strongly I feel about every facet of his being. There is no way of telling her how much I wish I didn’t, how it’s a never-ending cycle. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even myself.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I paw at my face, hating myself. “Do you all think that little of me?”

“Oh, _jamais_ , Elio. We think the world of you.”

They are her parting words, the TV going dark as she squeezes my arm and heads out into the garden. I watch her walk away, maybe hoping I’ll follow her. When I don’t, she turns around the side of the house, the cigarette smoke dissipating behind her.

I remember the first time she truly asked me about him, after he had gone back to the States. It was nearly October, the air crisp like cotton but melancholy like an old silent war film. I had been in my room, staring at pages of music, listening to words over and over in my mind—lyrics, of course, but something more. Oliver’s words. Always on repeat among my chaotic insides. It was his voice and his laugh and his teasing and his touch and even words he’d never said—all the words I wished he had. It was everything and nothing, the very best moments and the very worst.

She had knocked on my door but I didn’t hear her through the static of a recorded song that had lost its signal. I shook off my headphones with a laborious eye roll when she hovered over my desk, arms crossed, a faint smile playing at her warm features. Outside, the sun had been setting and the golden hues of early autumn scattered around my room through the windows. The posters on my walls danced and I closed my eyes, just for a second, while she waited above me. I had become accustomed to suspending time, for mere seconds on end, just to rid myself of a reality that I had somehow fallen victim to. A reality cold and dark, still alive at the fringes, begging for any semblance of the final few weeks I’d had with him in the summertime.

“Homework?” she questioned first, tapping my transcriptions. She glanced down her nose at the Walkman beside my Sylvia Plath text, then at the Paul Young cassette peaking out from under my unfinished essay that wasn’t due until the following Tuesday.

I leaned back in my chair, blowing the hair out of my face with an exaggerated sigh in the direction of my ceiling.

“ _Presque_ ,” I said, nodding down at it. It was four short paragraphs of simulated sincerity, whole yet unsatisfying. I hadn’t thought much about rewriting it, though I knew I probably would because I questioned every goddamn thought that passed through my mind, let alone went down on paper.

She took my pause in stride, sitting down at the edge of my bed. Her hands smoothed over the sheets, fingers pressing over the corners like Mafalda did. She stared at the postcard on my wall for several moments, both of us quiet in the soft stillness.

“Where are you today, hmm?”

“What?” I looked away, back to my music, unable to meet her eyes. I knew those eyes, that look, the sweet sadness stalling between us.

“You miss him,” she whispered finally, eyes then moving to the window as if expecting him to be there. “I know you do.”

My father hadn’t told her—I knew he wouldn’t. But still a piece of me went slack when she said that. Somewhere in me had always expected her to bring him up, in that special way, but another piece of me still believed we were exclusive to only us, a secret to be revealed, something distinctly ours and no one else’s. But how could we be when I was so transparent? When everything that made me feel anything was because of him?

“It doesn’t matter,” I had told her. I felt my eyes bursting from the inside out; still I sat there and shook my head, willing it all away.

My name was all it took for me to collapse into her, a pool of embarrassing teenage limbs and stacked ragged breathing. I couldn’t fight it, couldn’t pretend that she was wrong. Everything was entirely too exhausting.

 _Is it better to speak or to die?_ She had asked me again, quoting her story, rubbing the wetness away from my cheeks the way I dreamt Oliver would.

 _To die_ , I wanted to tell her. _It is better to die than to ever have spoken to Oliver, and subsequently know a life without him._

“You are my moon and stars,” she had assured me. “So bright. Maybe the brightest around him, yes?”

She knew the answer, not waiting for me to reply. “You’re still the brightest, _mon trésor_. You’re shining down on all of us. Don’t let his absence make you dull. You’ve always been much too hard on yourself.”

Her words were always out of the novels she read, I supposed, but still she made them sound so kind, so pure. So true. I hid my face in her shoulder a little while longer, wondering if that brightness still shone down on Oliver, somewhere far away from me but still close enough to believe. I had thought maybe it did, that his world had been entirely too dark before me, but when that call had come over winter break, everything faded to black once again.

Now, as I watch the place where my mother had been as she left me in front of the black TV, I feel myself reeling in the light again. I get up from the sofa and take a deep breath, my insides quaking, my outsides clammy. My nerves nearly get the better of me as I slowly open the office door, finding Oliver kneeling on the ground with dozens of slides dotting the floorboards around him. A pen is perched behind his left ear, and a box of notecards sits futile near his bare feet.

My father is nowhere to be seen.

“Elio,” he says. In the way that no one else will. His eyes capture mine in a swift glance. I shut the door behind me and step further into his line of vision. I take a safe out by sitting on the chair above him, but everything in me is burning with such hot desire that it all but kills me to not have any part of me touching him. I scoot a tad closer, my toes bumping into his thigh.

“Jenny’s upstairs,” I feel I have to say first. “Asleep.”

“I’m not surprised,” he says, looking back down at the slides. He sighs and bends back with a yawn. “That flight was brutal. I don’t know how I’ve made it this long without passing out myself.”

 _You’re killing me_ , I scream in my head. _Talk to me. Say something real._

“Last summer you skipped your first meal here,” I say, testing out a small, shy laugh. “You know, you were dead asleep and it was time for dinner, and I—I went in to tell you. You wouldn’t get up so I dropped a book on the floor so you’d wake up. Still you denied me. Said something about covering for my mom. You called me ‘buddy.’ _Jesus_. I could’ve died right then.”

Oliver cracks a grin, dimples drowning me in his abyss. “You dropped that book on purpose? What a little prick.”

He shoves my shoulder and begins to draw his hand back when I grab it and instinctively pull it to my face. I hold it there, on my cheek, for several blissful seconds before he flinches and I drop it away from my skin—the skin that is his for all that time allows.

“Elio,” I plead in a low, muted murmur. I reach out and find his hand again, resting on the edge of the chair. He has moved closer to me now, his thigh now pressing into my ankle and his eyes twinkling into my sky. Both of us as bright as the sun.

“You’re killing me,” he reveals finally, saying the words I had thought only moments before, and everyday since I had met him. His fingers brush mine but they don’t stay there. “I thought you’d be over me.”

“How could you think that?” I feel the fire fill my eyes, surely red to him. I feel my skin rage with goosebumps. “Fuck,” I mumble when my eyes betray me, always too soon. I turn away from him and he is cruel enough to reach out to me, his fingers moving over my back in circles. It’s exactly what I want but I can’t stand it, his words and his apologies and his excuses. I stand up and go for the window, unlatching the lock so I might have some chance at breathing, at normality. It’s a ridiculous trick of the mind that he is both the one thing that I cannot breathe without and the one thing that leaves me breathless, all in one insufferable second.

How could I ever be over him in any way?

I hear my mother and Mafalda at a distance, in the garden. Oliver comes up behind me, also listening. We stand there for what could be hours.

“Are you over me, then? Is that it?” My voice shakes.

“No.”

It is simple and direct, but hides much more, I know. It is barely an admission.

Once my father reappears, I leave Oliver in the office, staring after me. There is a whole year between us of words to be said or not said, of places to touch, of feelings to rediscover and uncover. Still I resent him.

At dinner, as predicted, he and Jenny are two empty place settings. My mother and father exchange a look when I begin eating before Mafalda can even clear their plates away. They start talking about politics to fill the silence.

 _I don’t care_ , I think. _I don’t care if they ever eat with us again._

I am lying to myself, again and again, all for him, and I hope he knows it. I hope he can’t stand it. I hope he can’t sleep and he finds me and realizes that of everything, I am not the one he needs to understand. He already understands me. I understand him. That’s just it—we understand each other all too well.

The lack of misunderstanding is perhaps what’s most maddening. He still sees so much of himself in me that he doesn’t know how to deny it, because he can’t. Whenever he allows himself to realize this, possibly putting it off for days—I’ll be waiting, with my name forever at my lips.

 _Oliver_ , he’ll say. _I’m sorry—do you know how sorry I am?_

Until then.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** I do not speak Italian or French, so please excuse the lack of authentic language being used by Marzia, or even Elio's mom (in the previous chapter). I just chose a few words to add every once and awhile, but I didn't want to take the easy way out and use Google translate, because I know that would not be an authentic, true portrayal of the languages. I hope you understand. Thanks!

“She’s beautiful,” Marzia muses, taking a long sip on her apricot juice. She looks out over the yard, watching Jenny twirl about in a bright yellow frock as she listens to music, something I’ve never heard before. I itch to transcribe it, but everyone is transfixed on only Jenny. I suppose that gives me a good excuse to continue staring at Oliver sitting down on the grass below her. Every few minutes, he looks up from his book and finds me, keeping an eye on me. Every few minutes, my face grows warmer from more than just the sun.

“Where did they meet?” she asks me.

I shrug. “School, I guess. Cliché and boring.”

“Elio, she seems nice.” I feel her sigh vibrate throughout my chest. Her fingers clench mine, a safeguard. “Have you been nice to her?”

“Who are you, my mother?” I joke, moving a few inches away from her, now completely off the beach towel we had been sharing. “You don’t have to worry about me. Please, I’m fine. It doesn’t matter.”

 _It doesn’t matter_. How many times do I have to say it to believe it?

She makes a telltale noise like she doesn’t believe me—she knows me too well. “Okay. Forget it.”

I feel an eye roll building at the back of my mind but it evaporates when she leans over and pecks me on the cheek. I look at her, wild eyes curious. She hadn’t kissed me in weeks, and often I didn’t let her when she tried. It had been awkward and sad after the end of last summer, but somehow our friendship still remained, though slightly broken in places it had once been overly flirtatious and sexual. I still loved parts of her, still tasted her in my mouth during the night, even still missed her moving underneath me. Sometimes we indulged ourselves, just a little, but I knew it wasn’t fair. She’d always be something for me that no one else could take away, but we both knew she would never be him. Somehow, by a twist of a small yet slightly callous miracle, she understood that.

“For luck,” she explains then with a smile. “With them.”

“With them?”

“You know what I mean.” Her face swings away from mine as she coils onto her side and closes her eyes. She kicks off her sandals, unwavering. “You’ve waited this long for him to come back. What are you going to do now that he is finally here? Do you think he loves her?”

 _No_ , I want to say, or rather, scream. _He loves the idea of her, the simplicity of her, the truth of her, the presence of her. She is pretty and sweet, admirable. But is she real to him? Is she someone he shares much more than a bed with? Is she his Oliver?_

_Never._

“They’re going to get married whether he loves her or not,” is all I say, though it tastes bitter as it leaves my lips.

Marzia is half-asleep, or possibly just annoyed, when she mumbles, “you don’t sound like you really believe that.”

But that’s what people like him are expected to do, and it will destroy me until the end of time. He isn’t over me—he’d said it just yesterday—but what good did that do in our little bubble of surrealistic promise? The real world—his real world—didn’t understand the concept of a true inner self. He was a traitor to his insides. A Napoleon dressed in American skin.

“Go talk to him,” she urges, nudging my stomach with her elbow.

“Alright, alright.” I push up off the ground, squinting over at them. Oliver is lying back under a tree with his book and Jenny is now sitting cross-legged beside him. She fans herself with one of his papers and I bite my lip to cover a smirk when he carefully—impatiently—plucks the paper from her hands and adds it to the folder he has under another, thicker book. He proceeds to pass her a much smaller notecard.

“ _Je te deteste_ ,” I throw back at Marzia, sliding my sunglasses back on. She sits up with a slight scowl.

“ _Tu m’aimes,_ Elio. _Ciao_.”

I stalk across the yard, gaining confidence in uncertain waves. Oliver is too enthralled in his book to notice me as I come upon them, a lone shadow falling over his body. Irritated, he looks up as Jenny offers a charming beam of greeting.

“How was the water?” Jenny asks when she sees my damp hair, droplets falling onto her blanket.

“Cold,” I reply, almost bored—for his sake. Always for his sake. “Marzia says hello.”

“Your girlfriend? I saw a picture of her in your room. You’re cute together, I think.”

I take this moment to drop into a squat and dig around in their basket, producing a ripe peach. I bite into it, eyes trained on Oliver’s. He’s sweating, waiting for my answer, and I revel in it a little longer as I eat around the pit. Juice dribbles down my chin and once it hits my chest I feel my heartbeat quicken. He’s still watching me.

“Just a friend.”

Jenny nods, picking a peach for herself. “She’s so pretty, nonetheless. _God_ , do you get the sense that everyone around here is from a movie? I feel so… so American.” She giggles, almost embarrassed, and glances at Oliver for validation.

“ _Americano_ , as Elio would say,” he says. “Those goddamn _Americani_. They ruin everything.”

_You ruin me, Oliver._

A half-smile appears on my face but falters as he closes his book and makes like he’s about to get up and walk away. I can’t let him avoid me again.

“You should try the water,” I announce in a strange command of a tone aimed at Jenny. I panic and throw my hand out in the direction of the river, out beyond Marzia and the few others playing volleyball nearby. “Marzia would go with you. She can show you the best spot, not far from here. There’s a killer view of the mountains.”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Shit, I just remembered that I promised Pro I’d help him with some more of those slides. His organization system is God-awful,” Oliver says out of nowhere, and I could kiss him, right now, forever. “Go on, Jen. Have fun.”

I know she’s hiding a childlike grin when she says, “Well, okay. I won’t be long. Are you sure Marzia won’t mind? She doesn’t even know me.”

“Welcome to Italia.” It’s stupid, but again my words have left me, on hold for Oliver to embrace as he sees fit. “If you see Anchise, maybe you’ll even learn how to catch a fish.”

“Later,” Oliver adds, but he is looking at me, knowing my heart is bound to snap right out of my ribcage.

With a girlish wave, she grabs her sunglasses and leaves her boom box behind, still softly playing the music, which sounds supremely familiar around the edges. It’s hypnotizing, very pop, and full of synthetic keyboard and guitar. My fingers are miming hitting ivory, trying to figure out the notes and chords. I’m aware Oliver is watching me, his smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth. I drop my hands to my sides when he lowers his aviator-style shades and stands up.

“New Duran Duran,” he says. “This cassette must not have come out here yet.”

“Guess not.”

He nods, a hand resting on the waistband of his trunks—new, deep violet ones with turquoise stripes that I’d never seen before. The stripes match his eyes and I wonder if Jenny had noticed that as immediately as I had.

“You don’t really have to help my dad,” I say, glancing behind us and holding my breath. Marzia and Jenny are gone and I breathe out slowly with every intention of losing my breath with him yet again.

“How did you know?”

His smile is so grand it blinds even the sky and I can’t help it—I reach out to him. I touch his hand, his arm, linger over his collarbone. His chin moves to brush the back of my palm and his breath catches, right in front of me, in front of anyone who might be watching us. Neither of us seem to care. I rub my thumb over his Adam’s apple before he grabs it away. I let it fall back down to my side, trembling, as he backs up against the tree trunk and stares up at all of the tangles of branches and leaves, mouth agape. He is in his heaven.

“It’d be so much easier, if you didn’t give a damn about me,” he says, his voice hoarse on words that with her must sound fake. “If I came back and you hated me. I almost hoped that you did.”

I pick up another peach, tossing it from hand to hand, focusing on it rather than look into those eyes. For several seconds, I cannot answer him aloud.

_I do hate you—I hate you so much for leaving, for not calling, for not coming back. For getting engaged to some girl you never told me about—lying to her, everyone, especially me. I hate you for knowing yourself, yet not knowing yourself really at all. I hate you for knowing me just the same._

“Say something, Elio.”

I drop the peach to the ground. My vision begins to blur. “You only want me to hate you, so you can feel better about marrying her. I’m such a problem for you, right? My feelings are inconvenient for you?”

He grimaces, so obvious when I look at him, for he knows I’m right. You didn’t get to choose your emotions, or who was on the receiving end of those emotions.

 _It’d be easier for me, too_ , I thought. _I wouldn’t have wasted this entire past year in even more self-loathing and self-pity, wishing you were there. Wishing I were there with you. Wishing against all else, that I was anywhere with you. You coming here is the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. Sometimes I don’t know how I lived before you. But living after you is nearly impossible._

“I didn’t mean it,” he whispers when I can’t stand to look at him. “I don’t want you to hate me. That was stupid, Elio.”

“Then what do you want?”

His hesitation is every resounding answer I need. I know him, I know whatever he says will be a lie, because it’s been barely 24 hours and he’s still in that incessant phase of denial. I know the words inside his head, the answers his skin wants to show me. I know him.

_If not later, when?_

I look up at him now, past him, into him, all around him. His very being radiates my entirety back at me. We are each other’s; on 35 mm film, in the biggest cinema, on the busiest day. Our bodies entwined, our souls forever on the mend from each other’s sweet rapture. I press my hand to his neck once more—feeling for that euphoria, feeling for his Star of David necklace. With a slight tug, I wrap it around my finger and bring him closer to me.

“You can’t keep doing this to me,” I say. “All this back-and-forth. When can I see you— _really_ see you, Oliver? Don’t you see me?”

We fall back into the tree trunk, in the shadows, away from laughter coming from the volleyball game. He blows hot breath on my forehead. Touches my waist.

“I’ve fucked up so many things in my life—didn’t I do the same to you?”

“Beyond,” I say and it comes out like some kind of beg, like I’m pleading for him to wreak as much havoc as possible.

He lets go of me, if only to breathe, and then proceeds to rest his forehead on my shoulder for a tormenting seven seconds. I feel his heat in the very pits of my stomach. Everything he does sears me into a frenzied state of expectancy.

“Look what you’ve done to me. It’s only been a _day_.”

_You've done much worse to me, Oliver. And I don’t even care. I never will care more about anything than I do for you._

“Tonight.” His head bobs forward and back as if mulling this over, though he is the one to bring it up in such specificity. “After Jenny goes to bed, I’ll come find you. You deserve more than what I’ve ever given you, but I can’t stand the thought of you giving what you have given me to anyone else. I know you’ve done a lot of waiting—but please wait for me just a little longer. That’s all I can ask.”

A wash of relief mixed with nervous anticipation settles over me. All I do is nod, holding myself to keep from swaying all over the yard in a high state of ecstasy. I don’t know what he’ll say, but I have always known what he feels, and somehow that is enough for now.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOLD ON TO YOUR SEATS. Or whatever you're sitting on. Or maybe you're not even sitting - in any case, this chapter may make you want to throw your computer or phone out the window. Please refrain - there is still much more to come, I promise :)

At dinner that evening, Jenny raved about the river and the sights Marzia had showed her, though it wasn’t much to behold—at least not in the manner she was conveying. I supposed she was overexcited about everything my world encompassed on a daily basis, and perhaps I was too occupied with a certain aspect of her everyday world to be concerned much with Italian Riviera views. Still, I entertained her conversation with quips about the river from my childhood, and of Marzia, too. Oliver listened particularly to these parts, a light smile on his face. Our eyes barely met during the meal but I could feel him in every bite that I forked in without tasting. He consumed me in a way one could never accurately explain in words.

Dessert began to take on a dull aftertaste, as my father’s American colleagues staying in Rome showed up as Mafalda brought out berry tartes. Jenny made a point to tell everyone, rather uselessly, that these were the berries she and I had picked from yesterday. Oliver had been the only one amused by this fact.

“Elio, bring a bottle out, won’t you, darling?” my mother asked when Henry and Vincent from Yale settled in around the table. “The Chianti.”

Once I had fetched the wine, I dismissed myself from the table. My watch said it was only 8:30 p.m., so I busied myself with transcribing music—the Duran Duran cassette that Oliver had so graciously plucked from the boom box for me—and fell asleep after awhile. When I awoke, it was pure dark outside; the house was shrouded in a sweet silence, and the breeze from my open window called for me like a shadowed whisper from a past life left untouched.

I checked my watch. 10:53 p.m.

Now, only a mere twenty minutes later, I continue to sit by the window, staring out at the spot where our bikes had been parked since yesterday. It seemed ages ago, seeing Oliver’s face again after so long apart. I’m almost not sure it’s real.

Through the wall, I hear a voice—Jenny.

“The light, Oliver,” she says, muffled. I lean back in my chair, listening through the crack in the bathroom door. “Please, enough reading for tonight. You’re bound to go mad with all of that tiny font.”

Oliver clears his throat and my skin prickles with a prolonged need to be near him again. To be so encased in his sphere of magnitude that his pull on me is my entire universe succumbing to his gravity. We are a galaxy destined to explode, and I’ll willingly shatter into millions more pieces for him, again and again, always.

“Just finishing up,” he whispers back. “Give me… forty-seven seconds.”

“You can’t really finish up something in forty-seven seconds,” she says. “I know you. Forty-seven seconds turns into forty-seven minutes very quickly.”

_I know you._

I want to bang on the wall with a fierce fist of frustrated teenage angst. The kind from the movies. The kind so cliché but so characteristically true. I am positive that she knows of him, or about him, but she doesn’t know—couldn’t know—the heart that beats within me, within him, for only us two. She doesn’t know that he has always been mine, born not for her, but for me. How her soul knows a humble piece of Oliver, but mine is the one he calls his own.

She doesn’t know him—how could she?

And yet, she does know him. She knows his parts he shows to everyone, the role he plays around everyone else but me. Maybe that Oliver is not mine, and not the truest of his self, but it is still Oliver. He could not be my Oliver without the existence of those parts, however strained they may be. Maybe someday I would understand that more fully, and appreciate the fact that at least that Oliver was not all of him. At least my Oliver was exclusive to only me, only us. I had to hold on to that.

Some fifteen minutes later, I hear a slight click of my lamp. Jenny mumbles something I can’t make out. I figure I can’t stand any more waiting inside, so close to him, so I pull on a sweater and tiptoe downstairs, breaking out into the cool night.

My feet begin to sink into the earth as I near the river. The moon gazes down at the water, shimmering. The stars are there too, fielding admirers from afar. It’s a dizzying, mesmerizing anxiety watching them. It’s how I feel watching him when he’s not mine.

“Elio,” comes a cautious whisper behind me.

I turn around to meet him, tucking my chin. Suddenly I’m too shy. Too Elio. Too afraid that my Oliver has been left back inside, or even back in last summer’s surreptitious haze.

“It’s midnight,” I say. “How’d you manage that?”

He reaches down to pick up a few pebbles, hiding his face. “Luck, I suppose. Though what significance does midnight have?”

He looks at me now, half of his face cast in the moonlight, and cops a deep chuckle that could shake me into the core of the planet if I let it.

“No significance whatsoever.”

“None at all?”

“Just a hint. Maybe.”

“ _Maybe_ ,” he repeats back to me with a smirk.

I notice a sheaf of papers sticking out of his pocket then, thick off-white pages catching the light. He realizes my lack of easy banter and pulls out the pages carefully, which unfold into a bound book of sorts. I recognize the title printed on the front immediately.

_The Heart’s Valet: Selected Essays._

“You didn’t,” I breathe and my whole body vibrates with disbelief. “ _Shit_ , Oliver. You actually fucking found one. You just went and you—you remembered.”

He hands it over and crosses his arms, leaning back against a tree like he’s been bred to do only that for the rest of his days. He looks so happy, perhaps that he’s made me happy. I want to ask him to be sure, but I am speechless. So easily I surrender all of my inhibitions to him. So easily he cures me of what he also inflicts upon me.

“I’d always wanted to visit Johns Hopkins,” he says. “Though I have no idea what the hell they really do there. It definitely goes over my head. Bioengineering and molecular biology… People probably saw me walking around campus with my single notebook and my copy of Kafka and thought ‘who the fuck is this guy?’ I bet you would have loved to see me so out of place.” He face rests on an easy smile.

My eyes stay locked on his for a few seconds more before I tear them away, scanning the Table of Contents. I find my name and drop to the ground, nestling the book between my legs. I feel him join me after a minute or two, flipping through the pages until I find page 87.

“I stopped at a coffee shop just off campus and there it was—waiting for me to find it. _The Oaths of My Father_ by Elio Perlman.”

He taps the page where I haven’t had the courage to even look yet. I didn’t expect him to actually find it. To actually _want_ to find it. To do something like that for me.

“You’ve read it, then.”

I am hesitant. There is so much of him in the words on this page, so obvious yet completely anonymous in nature to any one human being. But he had to know. Every word that I’d ever written since meeting him could be traced back to him. Every word that I’d ever said had been uttered in accordance to what he made me think, how he made me feel, how I acted because of him. I liked to believe I’d grow out of it, eventually, and be over him. Like he wanted.

But I wouldn’t. I am incapable of listing him out to a sea where I cannot swim. I can’t bear forgetting him, no matter what he’s done to me. It’s infuriating.

“I’ve read it,” he whispers. His fingers brush across my cheek and my eyes close out of habit. He pulls them away, leaving me in agony so raw that I feel my insides begin to freeze over. His brief heat had only fooled me.

“It’s captivating, genuine, incessantly honest. Precocious in every sense. It’s so very you, Elio. Your voice came to me as I read it, time and time again. Like some sort of dream. I returned to it so often I thought I might be going insane. I knew every part of you that you poured into it—and maybe it’s selfish, but I liked the idea that no one else reading it would ever be able to know that feeling.” He pauses. “I hate that it has to be this way.”

My body cannot take it much longer. “What are you saying?”

“Don’t ruin it,” he says, now closing his eyes. “We still have so many days.”

“ _Oliver_.”

His hand touches mine. Squeezes it. Doesn’t let go, not even when I let out a single reluctant cry.

“My dad is a closed-minded bastard, Elio.” I can hear his teeth grinding, jaw clenched. “He’d never understand. Hell, he’s not the only one. Not everyone can be so lucky to have parents like yours. The world is a shitty place, especially for someone like me. That’s why I can’t always be me—I can’t always be _Elio_ , don’t you understand? For us to exist outside of here? What could we be?”

“You’re fucking lying,” I spurt, rushing to deny any and all of it. He can’t be serious. He didn’t come back, after all this time, just to say this. “I thought you didn’t care what anyone thinks?”

He is slow to reply. Breathing in and out. Letting go of my hand and reaching out for some semblance of a working brain—something he clearly doesn’t possess anymore.

“I don’t know,” he finally says and I shove him as hard as I can. He falls backward into the damp grass and coughs. I scramble to stand up, for once to tower over him. But I feel so small. Too small. Invisible and unwanted, like a disease.

I crumple into the ground next to him, choking on my own goddamn saliva. He pulls me into him and I forfeit my body to his touch, all over. His lips don’t find me, only his hands and his arms and his chest—still the lips of last summer reappear in my mind and my fingertips touch the lips in front of me now, begging for him to open them, to tell me it is all a stupid joke. That he has come back for me, all of me. That he doesn’t care—we are us and we are invincible.

“Why did you even come back? What’s the point?”

“I missed you. More than you know. More than anyone.”

“But you’re just going to leave again.” I trace his lips once more and his entire face quivers with unabashed elation. “Why can’t you just stay?”

“Make me stay,” he laments. “Make the rest of it go away.”

_You torture me, Oliver. Every word. Do you know what you’ve done to me in the span of twenty, thirty minutes? Do you have any ounce of humanity left in you?_

He catches my hand and brings it to his chest. I feel his heartbeat beneath my palm and I swear it’s the exact same as mine.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

“What about Jenny?” I ask because I have to.

“I don’t know.”

“Please,” I try again, forever falling back into the realm of pleading with him when he should be pleading with me. “I know you don’t really believe all of that. You’re—I… I can’t lose you again. You can’t do that to me. You’re—you’re delusional, okay? Irrational, even. Right? You have to be.”

I listen for his reply. But they are the same words, his mind unraveling at the seams.

“ _I don’t know_.”


	6. Chapter 6

He is still on the ground, now staring off toward the other side of the riverbank. His gaze lists sideways and back, focusing and refocusing, blinking and unblinking. When his forehead creases, my eyebrows knit. And when he rubs his eyes, my eyes itch. I watch him, and I am him. At thirty, fifty, seventy-five years old—I am always going to be him.

_‘I don’t know’, you say. But I know. I know so well, Oliver. How do you not know? How can you lay here beside me in the cold darkness of a night only we can claim and not know?_

“Tell me what you don’t know,” I venture, if only to keep him talking to me. He shifts to face me again and makes like he’s waiting for me to encourage him further. As if I am the one with a doctorate degree in linguistics.

He sighs and I feel it resound inside me. A reawakening.

“I don’t know.” He laughs this time, but doesn’t mean it.

“You’re impossible.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You don’t know, but you know damn well. You’ve had a year to know what I don’t. You’ve had a year to figure out what you wanted to know—what you needed to know—while I wait and wait and wait like an idiot. You don’t know, Oliver?” I thrust the pages back at him. “Read this again if you think you don’t fucking know.”

With an embarrassed cough he takes the book back. He props himself up on his elbows and I imagine myself cupping them in my mouth, trailing over every inch of his skin. I hate that I want him in moments like this, when we are both so vulnerable in different ways. He can feel me, my mind overturning every word he’s said and not said, and he gives in a little bit, sitting up and scooting closer so that I have little choice but to rest my forehead at the spot where his neck meets his collarbone. It is a spot I’ve dreamt of feeling again, a piece of him not altogether private but still sensitive to another’s touch. When his hand goes to my hair, I squeeze my eyes closed and pray this might be a dream—so that he won’t ever let go. We are not meant to be of two bodies. We are intrinsically one.

“Don’t make me into some kind of home wrecker, okay?” I don’t look at him but I can just picture his smile disappearing into my hair.

“You’re not wrecking anything, Elio. Don’t think that way.”

“I can’t not think that way.”

He says nothing. Again. A silent understanding.

“Jenny likes you,” he says, which only makes it worse.

So I laugh a little, digging my chin into his chest so he can feel something. Like how much it hurts, in every way, every second. My life has become full of these seconds, whether I am near him or not. I knew how much I had missed him, with blue-flame desire. But having him back—I begin to miss him even more, his being suddenly come back to fruition before me, though not how he was a year ago. I miss him now because he is not wholly mine. I miss him even as he sits here before me, somewhere between being mine and being cast away from me all over again. I miss him past, present, and future.

_How can I miss you so much when you’re right here?_

He clears his throat and I feel it against my scalp. A shiver burns through me and I grip his knee, finding it to be covered in goosebumps. Neither of us moves.

“Why aren’t you pushing me away?” I murmur in a daze. “Why do you insist on doing this to me? Every time I think you’ve talked yourself into refusing me—you pull me back in.”

“I—I thought this is what you wanted.”

“As if you don’t?” I say and roll my eyes so far back into my skull there is no chance that he doesn’t notice. I want him to notice—I want him to always notice, my existence on constant replay in his mind. “I know, I know— _you don’t know_. But I bet you know much more when it comes to me than when it comes to her. Tell me I’m wrong, and we can go back to pretending. I swear to God, it’s like clockwork. Shall we meet again tomorrow night for a repeat? Maybe don’t bring _The Heart’s Valet_ , though—that really threw me off.”

“Asshole,” he scoffs as he untangles himself from me, peering into my eyes. He rubs his own, palms masking his eyelids. When he opens them again they are red and tired, but so full of someone I knew to still be in there—my Oliver.

 _Elio, Elio, Elio_ , _Elio_ I chant in my head. My lips are so close to saying it aloud.

He shakes his head. “ _Fuck_ , I really missed you.”

“So you’ve said.”

“You’re really gunning for your tombstone to read ‘such a little asshole’, aren’t you?”

I grin, in spite of myself. But then I feel it again, crawling out of my mouth before I can stop it. “Please don’t marry her, Oliver.”

“Elio,” he warns, standing up. I’ve lost him for the night, I know. Every emotion has come bubbling to the surface—but I had to say it. I’ll say it every day, every minute I have with him, until he hears me.

“Glad we talked,” I say, louder, as he starts to walk away. I know he will stop, that he will wait for me, that he will even stumble through the darkness of the house with me like we are drunken aristocrats trying to light a cigar or find the toilet. I know he wants so badly to say what is on the tip of my tongue.

I catch up to him on the edge of the orchard, the house only fifty or sixty feet away from our polarizing bodies. He glances down at me and exhales a sigh.

“Well, goodnight.”

I twist my lips to the side and hug myself, wrapping my arms so tightly around my torso that maybe I will snap something, just so I might feel something other than him. Him so ingrained in me that when my heart pumps fresh blood, it is his. That when my nerves tense, it is because he is anxious. That when my mind is at war with itself, it is at war with him.

_Don’t you see? This blood flooding behind my cheeks, creeping down my neck? It’s not just because of you—it is you. You are forever in me._

“I suppose we shake hands now, right?”

His eyes narrow, though his lips are working hard not to smile. “ _Don’t_.”

He leans forward, only slightly, to press his thumb to my cheek, then he forces himself to retract back into their Oliver. We move to keep a short distance between us, shuffling back to the house, and I almost reach out and grab his shirt from behind. I’d yank him backwards, right into me, and it would take only three seamless seconds to catch his lips with mine. I feel both of his hands all over me with a wild rebirth, and my own hands traveling underneath his clothes.

I can feel it, so much of us human nature—will it ever be that way again? Will he ever let it all happen again, his guarded anguish lurking like a serpentine sentinel everywhere we go? Is it fair to anyone to hide so much of himself when I have seen every inch of him, when I _know_ every inch of him in details beyond their comprehension? When he knows the same of me?

No, fairness is not much for the living. I had experienced that a thousand times over. Life was only fair when you didn’t care for it to be.

“I’m not jealous of her,” I tell him in a whisper when we are just outside the back door. The only light comes from above us, the lamp still on over my desk, my transcriptions all but forgotten in the mix of things. “I just want you to know that.”

“That has always seemed to be a habit of yours—wanting me to know things.”

He steps inside and waits for me to follow, knowing I am spinning his words around in every direction. I can barely focus on taking the stairs, my eyes already wanting to close and see his face on the back of my eyelids. When we reach the landing, Oliver turns toward my room and grabs for the doorknob. I mimic his stance one door down from him, looking up once more to find him staring at me, too.

With a modest nod, he dissolves into the room and absolves me of the night. My feet carry me to the door, _our_ door, and I listen for his movements—his shirt being tossed to the ground, _The Heart’s Valet_ being tucked carefully underneath the bed, his long legs climbing onto the mattress beside her dreaming figure. I hear the slight creak of the bedsprings, and then nothing at all.

Back in my sorry excuse of a room, I click off my lamp and don’t even bother to change. I fall back onto the bed with the heaviness of ninety years weighing me deep into the sheets. A few years sleep could never cure me of the exhaustion Oliver imposes on me, but I would go centuries without sleep just to hear him speak to me in sweet candor, if only a couple words.

My mind drifts away and I can picture him now, his whisper on the other side of the bathroom door. My eyes fly open at the soft rap on the old wood, tan knuckles giving in much too soon after seeing my own face at the back of his eyelids. I slip away from sheets I don’t feel and a pillow I don’t need to meet him in the doorway. His eyes are alight with boyish desire when he sees me.

“You shouldn’t let me get away with such bullshit,” he says, closing the door behind him. When he sees me still in my clothes, he shakes his head while his hands quiver at his sides. He’s a beautiful mess of tan skin and boxer shorts, hair sticking up on the side, eyes crazed in the best way. “You really believed all of that?”

“ _I don’t know_ ,” I toss at him and this sends us over the edge at last, one hand moving along my jaw and the other grabbing at the hem of my sweater. But he stops as my insides begin to slough off every layer of skin I have toughened in his absence, his eyes searching mine in the soft glow of the moon seeping in.

Slowly, his hand abandons my sweater in favor of the back of my neck as his eyes keep in contact with mine in such a way that I don’t think I can ever truly see another ever again. He has robbed me of mind and sight, and given me his body as his own, so that I might see myself as he sees me.

“Will you ever get sick of me?” he asks, lips suspended in time before me. “Will you ever not want me? Speak your name to someone else?”

“Never,” I say.

“ _Oliver_.”

“ _Elio_. _Elio, Elio, Elio_.”

A smile borne from sunrise and soft boiled eggs and frayed espadrilles and apricot juice and clear blue water melts into my lips, an entire year fit into one kiss and then two and onto infinity. On my lips, into my hairline, down my chest, over my hips, between my thighs. My sweater has found itself useless at the foot of my bed and I want him more than I want to breathe, more than I myself want to be alive. I do not live without him touching me; I do not live without him living inside me. I am his every inhale and he is my every exhale.

We have always been this way. We will always be this way.

But when I hear him moving in the bathroom, several hours later, I am still in my sweater and he has never been back in this room. I curse myself for conjuring up such memories and making them new. Reality never felt so lifeless.

“Elio,” he calls through the door now, his voice a deep cup of rich black coffee. “I’m going into town—are you coming?”

_Elio, were you dreaming of me last night? What did you do to me? Will you try again? Please try again. Please do with me what you want. I cannot stand the miles between us. I’m the asshole._

“What about Jenny?”

I ease open the bathroom door, left unlocked, and he is standing in front of the mirror with a comb, his hair wet and sleek. He looks at me with a funny furrow of his brows. Wishing I didn’t ask so many questions, probably, though he loves when I challenge him. When I fill his ears with only me. My eyes wander through the doorway into our room, which is empty of her and full of thoughts only for me and only of me.

“What about you?” he says.

A willing shrug shakes out of me. “Okay. So I’ll come.”

“I hope I’m not boring you. Don’t get so excited. Christ.”

_Your very existence excites me, Oliver._

My heart twitches inside my chest—he can feel it. He steps back from the sink and cocks his head at me. Studies the sweater from last night by the river, remembers everything in vivid detail as I do the same.

“I’m still here, Elio,” he says. “Don’t kill me off yet.”

“I wish I could,” I’m quick to reply. “Then maybe you’d really feel something.”

“I feel everything with you—isn’t it obvious?”

I pause for a prolonged beat before moving past him into our room. “Let’s just go. _Americano_.”

He winces, no longer finding the term humorous. “Aren’t you going to change?”

“No. What—will you be ashamed to be seen with me?”

He laughs and shakes his head, following me out onto the landing. Below us, I see Mafalda carrying a tray of breakfast—fresh juice and too many eggs, his favorite.

“You’re going to miss another Perlman dining experience—my mother will hate you for that,” I point out.

“As long as you won’t.”

He takes the stairs two at a time, all but dragging me down with him, and we are careful to walk slowly by the open back door on our way out to the front. He spots our bikes and takes off running for them, waving me along. I feel a huge grin building inside me until it bursts free and we are riding away from the villa once again, only now it is just he and I. I begin to lose grasp of all the anxiety pent up inside me.

“Where are we going?” I call up to him.

He slows to a stop, maybe a half mile away from home. “You’ll see.”

He takes off again, feet hanging lopsided over the pedals like they always will. I’ve memorized every piece of him so well that I even know how he will drop his hands from the handlebars when we have reached the long stretch down by the berm. I know him, I know him, _I am him_.

_Will you ever get sick of me?_

Not in this moment, not in any moment. I can only hope those moments rush to him in waves, that he might drown in what I feel. It’s not fair what he’s doing, but still I let him. Everything he does, I do as well. Maybe I am even worse than he is.

We will not last much longer on banter and timid touches alone, on the incessant back-and-forth that I thought we’d be done with by now. But it is apart of us, what we first acknowledged in us last summer, and it will always kill me, over and over.

 _Tell Jenny_ , I want to scream at him. _Just tell her and we can be done with all of this. You came back for me—I know you._

 _We still have so many days_ , he’d said.

For what, I’m not so sure.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you lovely readers for being patient with me! :)

Thirty minutes later, we come upon a strip of local shops that I have frequented with Marzia and Chiara, all with striped overhangs and potted flowers outside their open doors, begging you to come inside, stay awhile, be someone. Oliver, an American abroad with mirrored sunglasses and a deep blue Ralph Lauren Polo is already someone to everyone here, but he is much more than that when he glances back at me, seeks my nod of approval, and ushers me inside the gelato shop, _Sogni D’Oro—_ Sweet Dreams.

“ _Come va?_ ” Oliver says to the girl behind the counter, who blushes. She looks at me, too, and smiles, but it is out of courtesy more than anything. I don’t even mind—I’ll happily subsist in Oliver’s shadow forever if it means I am always apart of him in some way. An extension of himself, of myself.

“ _Bene, grazie. Bella giornata_.”

“ _Sì, bellissimo_.”

They exchange niceties like people in the movies, his teeth white and perfect as they beam and speak to her in his somewhat limited Italian. He looks to me every other second, perhaps wanting me to say something, but it’s intriguing and amusing watching him, everything he does, so I say nothing, only scanning the daily flavors in the case with a smirk nudging into his every thought.

“What kind do you want?” he asks.

 _You_ , I want to say. I think he knows this, though—his cheeks dimple and he waves the question away. He tells her two _amarenas_ , and holds up two fingers like he’s talking to a child. It’s endearing, he doesn’t mean it to come off that way, but I realize she doesn’t know that. There are so many parts of him that maybe only I recognize, that maybe only I understand. Strangers in passing may see the way he looks and assume they know him. How he is trained to act, to speak, to charm.

But do they know he carries the Star of David around his neck like a medal, proud of where he comes from, of who he is at his heart? Do they know he has always stuck out in a crowd and even if he appears to relish in this fact, many days he absolutely hates it?

No, of course not.

So often I am among them and their assumptions and their judgments, but not with him. Never with Oliver.

“ _Grazie_ ,” Oliver tells her when she hands over two translucent cups. The cherry sauce dribbles down the side of both and Oliver quickly moves to lick it before it drops to the floor like a bloodied wound. He catches me watching him, my lips mirroring his without meaning to. I take my cup and turn away so he won’t see me blush again, imagining his tongue on me instead. Imagining his everything on me instead.

I find myself walking away from him and back outside. My legs retire to a white wire bench in front of the shop, knowing he will take up the small space beside me and that the yet un-tanned strip of thigh on his left leg will touch mine. I find a sweet peace in this when he does just that, his shoulder digging into mine as he settles in with his cup of gelato that has begun to drip again. I don’t mind, can’t mind, can’t think— _please touch me_. _Please always sit next to me. Please look at me with the sun in your eyes, so that you squint and lean in closer. Please don’t ever stop._

“Do you like it?” It is a dumb question, the way he is slurping the cream off of his spoon. A tiny infatuation blooms in his eyes.

“ _Perfetto_.” He kisses his fingers. “I’ll have to thank Anchise for the recommendation.”

“I could’ve given you a recommendation,” I say. “I come here all the time. I mean, sometimes.”

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “Forgive me for not checking with you first. The all-knowing Elio.”

I bite my lip in an attempt to defer my smirk but it creeps out anyway, always searching for his admiration. His satisfaction swells inside me with each passing second and once he finishes, I fall victim to his gaze as it rests on me. Relaxed, comfortable. The way we should be when he’s not thinking about it too much. A year of separation doesn’t often do the soul well, and yet here we sit in the late morning sun, staring at each other as if we have been our entire lives. He is still the brightest, bluest sky, but in these exposed stolen moments, I remember glimpses of once shining down alongside him. My skin tingles with the idea that it will happen again.

 _See me. See you_. _It’s all right here._ _Waiting_.

“So, this is where you wanted to take me?”

He reaches for my cup, where a few remaining drops of cherry sauce have gathered around the rim. He traces his index finger around the edge and sucks off the juice—a ritual tease.

“You shouldn’t waste that.”

“You wanted to take me for gelato just so you could scold me for not licking it clean like you did?”

He laughs. “I just wanted to get away.”

“With me.”

“Yes, with you.” His fingers dance down the length of my arm. He stops at my watch, the same watch from last summer, the same watch I had counted down the minutes on until our midnight. Again and forever more, he knows this.

Enchantment seeps in, beheld in his cherry breath on my ear as his mouth hangs open in a moment of torment at my temple. He is so close to me, and _wants_ to be so close to me, and _needs_ to be so close to me, that it is too much. He breaks away with a ragged sigh, forcing his head into his hands. His shirt pulls taut over his back and without thinking, I drop my hand to the warmth of his body. It’s something he would do—comfort me when the thoughts in my head run chaotic. Although they’re always this way over him, and him being back here, in true physical form, must have them that way over me.

“I need you to do something for me,” he intones through his hands, barely peering back at me. Despite no one being around, he seems to have put the distance back between us within seconds. He twists out from under my hand and stands up, looking back down the street where we had left our bikes, rather haphazard, near the bridge.

“Anything.”

“Don’t let me win,” he says and his face breaks into a wild grin as he takes off down the street. He shouts something unintelligible and just the sound of his voice in pure exhilaration is everything. His feet pound the pavement with resounding, uneven slaps, his legs so long that he almost loses his balance trying to outrun me.

But I haven’t even started. I just stare after him, how happy he is—my Oliver, resurfaced in blinding technicolor. I wish to tear after him and kiss him until my lips are numb. Just to hear him call me Oliver again.

It’s more than enough to fuel the fire so I push off from the bench and fling myself into a manic sprint. I don’t even feel my movements as they gain on his awkward strides, only a few yards ahead of me. When he reaches the bikes and knocks mine over in an attempt at petty ambush, I curse at him in a string of French slang. He loves this, throwing his head back in raucous laughter while he begins to pedal away from me. I jolt my bike upright and pump my legs so fast after him that surely the rubber on the tires will be bald by the time we get back to the villa. I hope it will be—that perhaps my bike will fall into shambles halfway there. That he will have no choice.

 _You did that on purpose_ , he’d say. _You must think I’m so kind as to offer you a ride._

_More than kind. More than anything anyone could ever be. You are all of it. And we are all of it. You are every part of me that I am of you._

_But you aren’t just the best parts of me—you are all of me. The grinding teeth when I’m frustrated with the world, the adolescent hesitation and exaggeration around my friends, the twitching fingers when I don’t know when to speak my truth, the sweat on my neck on the hottest day, the goosebumps on my arms in the snow, the fragile space between my legs, the soft skin behind my knees, the hair above my eyes, the angry parts of me, the sad parts of me, the overzealous parts of me, the precocious parts of me, every part of me. You’re who I always was and always will be, Oliver. And that’s entirely you’re fault._

It’s maddening bottling it all up behind askance naïve smirks or tossed furtive glances across the back patio table. To look into his sunglass lenses and see myself staring back at me, in more ways than one.

I pedal faster with this always in my mind, almost able to reach out and touch his shoulder as we round the bend near the farmer’s market. He zigzags in front of me and cuts me off just as I let go of the handlebar.

“Oh, sorry!”

He’s not even the least bit sorry. And it makes me want him more.

We continue on for several hundred yards, just the sound of the wind and the drum of the bike wheels cycling over cobblestone, grass, gravel. Not far ahead is the berm—it’s exactly where he’s headed. My death will come all too soon if we are to revisit our spot only for him to taunt me again.

“Are we going where I think we’re going?” I shout up to him. I have little energy to overtake him now. What will I get if I win? A pat on the back? A ridiculous _Good job, buddy_? Another half-assed attempt at telling me that I am everything to him, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s engaged?

“I call bullshit,” I say when he doesn’t respond. He begins to slow down, the berm in such vivid proximity that my legs go weak. Knots of last summer’s reality procure a residence in my stomach.

But he doesn’t stop. He just floats on by, like waving to an old friend in passing. He stares back at it, then at me, for a few long seconds, then keeps on back toward the villa. The feeling in my stomach persists, though, and I lag behind him all the way. He’s off the bike and opening the front gate before I even reach the gravel drive.

When I meet him at the gate, he’s running a hand through his hair, slicking off sweat.

“I won,” he states with a triumphant breath.

“You won.”

“Aren’t you the least bit curious what we were playing for?”

“Oh, please enlighten me, Oliver.” I roll my eyes and push past him through the gate and into the yard. I hear him clamber after me and I bite down a playful smile.

I am about to give in when Jenny comes rushing into view, her skirt hiked up into the fist at her side. Her cheeks have lost every color she’s ever known and she’s a ghost, running right into Oliver’s chest. My words die on my tongue, as do Oliver’s, when she begins to sob.

“Where have you been?” she asks, wiping at her nose.

“I—We just went—” Oliver stammers, eyes wide and blue and everything I need, and if I weren’t so invested in Jenny’s overt concern, I’d climb inside them and never come out. “What’s the matter?”

She shakes her head, gulps down a heaving breath. “My grandma, she—she died last night.”

“Oh _Jen_ , oh my God.” Oliver wraps his arms around her and I hate myself for wishing it were me. I hate myself for being here, in this moment, probably one of the worst of her life, and I am a silly bystander still desperately grasping at her only source of comfort in this foreign country that serves her fresh apricot juice and pays her every compliment. Suddenly I feel like the _Americano_.

“My mom called about an hour ago. I don’t know what to do,” she cries. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Please, just tell me what you need from me,” Oliver whispers. And he’s holding her wilting body against him, rubbing her back, smoothing down her hair, rocking her back and forth—but he’s looking at only me.

 _Oliver_ , he mouths.

My eyes water. My throat constricts.

 _Elio_ , I mouth back.

Then I fade away into the house and up to my room, never wanting to reemerge in this lifetime ever again.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More is still to come after this chapter, don't worry! :)

What must be hours later, when the sky has bled all its boldest blues and yellows and oranges, an almost soundless rap comes at my door followed by my father peeking his head through the doorframe. I quickly drop my notebook under my bed and lay back against my pillow. My headphones hang useless around my neck as I stare up at the ceiling, willing it to crash down on me. _Do what you must_ , I think up to anyone that might be listening. _Make all of these feelings flee my bones. Bury me alive—anything will be better than this._

“A little dramatic, are we?” he says with a soft smile, his eyes crinkling behind his glasses. They are familiar and comforting, those eyes, so much so that I close my own and squeeze. I ball my sheets in my fists; arch my back as if the devil himself is being expelled from within—a tad dramatic, maybe.

He picks up the Walkman and pops out the tape, nodding because he knows what he’ll find. “The Smiths,” he murmurs. “You have such a transparent soul, Elio. I know it is what brings you the most infectious love and the most insufferable heartbreak.”

I roll onto my side so he can’t see my face. A heavy truth lingers between us. I won’t deny it—and yet, I won’t confirm it either. I’m afraid if I speak, my soul will bare itself unto the world at large, daring everyone to pity me. I don’t think I can handle much more of anything, but especially not that.

“What you have isn’t gone,” he says. I feel his hand rest on my ankle and I itch to shake it off, but I don’t. “I know having him back here is difficult—this doesn’t make it any easier. The pain piles up sometimes, but we can’t just wish it away. Jenny is very upset downstairs—maybe you could play for her? One of those contemporary things you’ve been transcribing, okay?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Oh, Elio, please—”

“ _Papa_ ,” I plead, turning over. I sigh with the weight of five thousand pounds on my back, crumpling into a heap beside him. “My playing won’t bring her grandmother back. Where’s Oliver?”

 _Where’s Oliver?_ As if to say, _Is Oliver at her side or is he somewhere looking for me? Is he asking where I am, what song I’m listening to that reminds me of him? Does he care? Am I the worst person in existence because her grandmother is dead but I still long for his concern to fall to me instead?_

A sidelong glance out my window and a lip purse later, he looks at me and gives a slight shrug, almost sympathetic for my fragile behalf. “Oliver has gone with Anchise to see about getting them a flight out this weekend.”

This weekend. Four days away. Less time with Oliver—less time with the only person that is as much me as anyone will ever be.

_I died waiting for you, and I’ll die waiting with you._

“Marzia came by earlier,” he says to change the subject as my face plays through every emotion. I settle on a grimace, not because of her—because of me. Because of the ridiculous way my heart beats for someone that could so easily be her, but is not. _I hate myself_ is not nearly strong enough in times like this.

“You didn’t send her up?” I ask like it’s not obvious.

“You’re allowed to feel these things, Elio. Some of them you must feel alone.”

He snaps the tape back in the Walkman and stands up, surveying my room and the feelings cast about. There’s self-loathing in the corner near my dirty clothes; there’s someone else’s sorrow passing for my own on the desk; there’s a measly spec of hope on the postcard on the wall; there’s lust oozing from the pages of my notebook under the bed; there’s white-hot fear dancing across the floor. He recognizes every single one with such earnest fairness that I consider searching for more of the love that might be hiding beneath my Tolstoy at the foot of my bed. I’m sure he sees what I don’t.

“We can’t choose or speak to how Oliver lives his life,” he says.

“But his life—that’s my life, too, you know?”

It is a whisper, but it deafens the entire room with rude awakening.

“I know, Elio. I know.”

 _I know, Elio_ surely holds traces among traces of _I agree with you, Elio. Do you think we want to see him with her after seeing him with you? But there is little we can do to force him to feel everything the way that you do. The way his heart wants him to. Not everyone is so open to feeling everything in such honesty. Not everyone is so comfortable being themselves for everyone else._

“Come down in a little bit,” he says several beats later, before he leaves the room. “If only to please your mother.”

“I’ll think about it,” I mutter.

I think for three whole minutes before I drag myself downstairs and into the den, where Jenny is curled up on the sofa with one of my mother’s books. Dried tears, like perfectly positioned glue marks, streak her face and her hair is up behind her ears. She looks so young—my age, even. My heart sinks as she turns a page and notices me hesitating by the piano, unsure of my next move, or any move. It feels like my every step is in the wrong direction.

Her hands go to her puffy cheeks and her voice creaks at the end. “Elio. Hi.”

She’s surprised I still exist, I suppose. Perhaps I am, too.

“I’m… I’m sorry about your grandma,” I start out, sitting miles away from her on the piano bench. “Oliver and I shouldn’t have gone into town without telling anyone.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t apologize—it’s not your fault. It came out of nowhere. She wasn’t even sick… Just one of those things, I guess. Better she wasn’t in pain, better it was quick, better she wasn’t alone… All this _better_ but I don’t _feel_ better at all. My mom told us not to rush home, that we should finish our trip because the funeral probably won’t be until next weekend anyway—we’re Catholic, a lot of family will be traveling from out of town, and there’s all these arrangements to be made—it just doesn’t feel right. Me not being there. I just feel like I should be there.”

I don’t know what to say. I’m not Oliver. Does he even know what to say? A part of me thinks not.

Because she’s not me.

_I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself._

“Do you play?” she asks suddenly, closing the book and edging closer. She sits now at the end of the armrest, hands holding up her chin as she withdraws into herself, trying to hide a body that is on the brink of breakdown. I know the feeling all too well, so I steal myself and toss her a nod of encouraging sincerity.

“Any requests?” I feel the need to inquire though I already know I’ll be playing her the beloved Duran Duran.

She just gives me a look that tells me to play anything and she’ll listen. I spread my transcriptions across the stand and feel my mother, and then my father, enter the room as my fingers bounce around the keys. It’s not perfect, and it’s not quite in tune with the 80s flare of synthetic sound, but it’s something to be heard. I almost forget what has happened in the last 24 hours while I play this minor note and that crescendo, all while they sit there and watch me. By the time I’ve finished, Jenny is grinning with applause echoing from her palms. My parents stand in the doorway, leaning into each other.

“Thank you.” Jenny rises to her feet and kisses my forehead. “You’re so sweet to do that for me. That was really great.”

My fickle introversion protrudes into the air between us and I manage a blush and a shrug. _You’re welcome_ is all I have to say, but I can’t. My mind drifts back to Oliver, and only speaking to Oliver, and I am mute to anyone else.

We have a late dinner without Oliver, Jenny eating as little as possible. My mother and father carry the conversation, talking about my father’s latest project and whether or not Oliver’s successor, Pauline, will be able to help him to the same level that Oliver did.

 _Of course not_ , I want to say, and it kills me.

As presumed, an exhausted Jenny heads up to bed not long after Mafalda has cleared away the table and left us with mugs of coffee and cream. Jenny doesn’t even touch hers, just excuses herself to the night upstairs. My mother seems worried that Oliver and Anchise aren’t back yet—the night has indeed come, with insects seeking out our skin and the moon looking to bless our dreams.

“Those travel agents will talk both your ears off if you let them,” my father tells her as the three of us gather back inside. “Let’s not worry just yet, _ma moitié.”_

Twenty minutes later, the front door opens and closes with a soft groan. I am the first to push up off the sofa and meet his gaze, tired eyes scanning the foyer. Both of us silent, I follow him into the kitchen.

“Any food left?” he asks, wiping a yawn across his face. “God, that was a nightmare.” He spots the day’s basket of fruit on the counter and picks out a pear.

“Did you get the flight booked, then?” I don’t bother hiding my apprehension. “You’re leaving this weekend?”

“Probably. I mean, yes.”

“So that’s it, then. You call me Oliver again and then you’re leaving again. With her.” My eyes turn to wells but still I face him.

“Jenny’s grandmother is dead, Elio.” His tone suggests that it’s a matter of courtesy rather than actual compassion. I take a token of optimism in that, no matter how messed up it is.

“I know.” I let out a sigh because the situation begs for it and I am a complete asshole if I am to justify every reason for him not to leave in the circumstances we’ve now been handed.

“What do we do now?”

It is him that asks, but it is what coats my every vein. It is what thickens my every blood cell. It is what shocks my every nerve ending. It is what propels me into his arms, all over again.

He holds me so tightly against him that I feel my body mold into his. His breath loses its way in my hair and my nose loses its scent in his chest. We stay this way for more moments than we should, and I know this is what I had been playing for earlier. I had been playing for Elio. I had been playing for us. I had been playing for the chance that he might really choose himself, and choose me.

And maybe he finally had—if only the universe might choose us, too.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for everyone that has read so far! It means the world to me, and I love reading every one of your comments. This chapter is sort-of a "bridge" chapter as the next few chapters will be BIG, so I hope you understand if this seems somewhat like filler. I'm not usually a fanfiction writer so I'm sorry if this annoys you in any way hahaha slow build has always kinda been my thing in all types of my writing... but I hope you'll be excited for what's to come - I hope to post another update soon! :)

The next day finds us in a pocket of pleasant illusion as my father totes Oliver, Jenny, and I to a museum a few towns away. It is supposed to take Jenny’s mind off of things, to give her the vacation while she still has it, but something still feels off when she laughs or even when she smiles. I figure she is doing much better than if it were me, but perhaps a part of me is also in mourning.

Last night, I had listened to Oliver through the wall when he went up to bed. His footsteps on the floorboards, his shoes shoved under the desk. The ache in his throat that I knew to be there, whether anyone heard it or not.

“Jen,” he had whispered much too loudly. “I’m back. We got the flight booked for Saturday. Just have to be at the train station by eleven.”

My heart had broken a little more at that. Like another piece had been chipped away and fallen at his feet.

“Oliver,” she had mumbled. I barely heard it—followed by a sharp inhale. When she began to cry, I moved away from the wall and curled into my bed with my headphones and Depeche Mode. Still her little sobs bounced around in my head all night, culminating with my own, pathetic tears and pounding fists into my pillow. I hated the fact that he had held me for so long downstairs not two hours before. I hated that he was holding her then. I hated that they were leaving.

But then, they were always going to leave. What difference did a few days make?

Every difference. Every part of me held onto the fact that just one touch, just one more conversation, might finally lead to Oliver finally giving in to me. It was wrong—I knew that—but was it right to live in a lie? To not be happy? Jenny was beautiful and kind and intelligent and sympathetic, a purebred of heart, a natural romantic, a true staple of the good side of humanity. I understood her and the parts of her whole.

But she was not Oliver’s and he was not hers. They were together but separate, people who cared for each other but weren’t each other. Maybe she was his Marzia, in a way. Maybe she knew that.

At the museum, she walks ahead of us as if surrounded by a sphere of divine melancholy that might entrap us lest we get too close. Even Oliver hangs back, unsure. My father notices all of our tentative steps and doesn’t hesitate to join her ahead, hand on her shoulder. They stop at a sculpture he studied in college and he launches into the long storied history of the piece. Oliver and I fade into the background of another room, full of Impressionism paintings, Monet’s lesser-known works among them.

“How come we never came here before?” he wonders aloud, eyes running wild over the colors and layers of oil paint before us. He stops in front of one basking in blues—every color that could also be found in his eyes. A sigh builds in me but I swallow it when he turns his head, waiting for my reply.

“We’re here now,” I say.

A lengthy pause.

“Please don’t be mad at me.”

I grind my teeth, clench my jaw, and pivot away from him toward a Camille Pissarro piece that jars the pristine misery of life’s hindrances back to the forefront of my mind. I want to laugh, _how ridiculous_ , but he would, and does, see right through it.

“I’m not mad, Oliver.”

“I can’t not go with her. She’s my fiancé—and I’ve met most of her family—she’s apart of my life, they’re apart of my life. I don’t know what else I can do,” he feels the need to explain, his hand rubbing the back of his neck.

But that’s just it—I completely understand. That’s the worst part.

I remembered writing in my diary once, in a haze, something along the lines of what I’d read in a novel Marzia had given me: _You can wait days and years for someone that might only wait hours for you—but still you wait for a later that may never come, in hopes that time has just stopped for them, and their hours are up—they’ll be coming to find you again soon. Time is death in many ways, but time is life when you exist in the realm of hope._

This felt like that—I’ll continue to wait for him because of that damned sliver of hope gnawing away at me. I’ll continue to wait for him because he came back— _he came back_ —he could do it again. I might waste too many years, just for one more night. I had died a thousand times over waiting; I had hated him a thousands times over waiting. Still I loved him a thousand times over when he had called me by his name once more.

“Jenny’s a good person,” I tell him. My eyes dart to the ceiling and back to the paintings, anywhere but him. “She needs you.”

His face drops. “Do you mean that?”

I do.

“Do you want me to mean it?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

 _I don’t know._ God, I could shake him and strangle him and kiss him and be inside him forever. There is nothing that I don’t feel for him. He is everything in full bloom within me. A year’s worth of dead leaves finding new life among his branches. I breathe him in like new life, ashes to ashes.

“Do you think he painted this at your spot?” Oliver asks, gesturing to the Monet before us. A thin river runs through patches of mossy grass and overgrowth with orange and magenta flowers dotting the foreground.

“Our spot, you mean?”

“Yes, Elio. Our spot.”

My heart swells twice its size and I seize the moment, bending toward him to squeeze his fingers. He squeezes back then lets go, his mind already wandering back to Jenny and my father, who are just outside the room now, engrossed in a painting much less striking than anything I see when I look at him.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” My father smiles so brightly that I volunteer a smile back as we join them. Oliver glances at Jenny as my father pretends not to notice. “One of Annella’s very favorites.”

Jenny smiles at this, how my father looks at the painting so fondly, so openly with his glasses sliding down his nose and his eyes gleaming with pride. Pride that my mother is still his best friend, that he can look at this painting and think _I asked her to marry me in front of this painting and we’ve been together ever since. Mi amour._

 _Oliver_ , I want to say. When he’s looking at Jenny but thinking of me. _Oliver, am I not the one you think of when it’s late at night and you hear the sounds of nocturnal rhythm outside your window? Am I not the one you long for in the deep heat of summer when all you wear are swim trunks and sunglasses? Am I not the one you daydream of when you go to the supermarket and there is a box of fresh peaches and apricots, begging to be plucked into your grasp? Am I not the only one?_

I can just hear his yes. I know it’s there. But there is only so much he can say with how the summer has gone awry. I want to ask him, if her grandmother had not passed away, if we had had more days, if you would have just told her—would we finally have gotten to be us again, in full volume, at maximum ultraviolet brightness? The entire sky marbled in our entwined bodies and every waterfall spilling forth our truths. The berm and the river and our bedroom and the orchard and the streets of Bergamo.

 _Yes_ , I think. _Yes, absolutely._

“Is there a museum shop?” Jenny asks. My mind snaps back to the physical present surrounding me. “I’d like to get a postcard, if I could.”

“Of course, of course,” my father says, ushering her down the hall. Again, Oliver falls into step beside me, trailing several feet behind them. I watch his feet moving in sync with mine, getting slower and slower with every step.

“Do you still have the shirt?”

Not my shirt, or your shirt, or our shirt. _The_ shirt. I know instantly to what he’s referring and a slight whirring noise of surrealism nips at my eardrums.

 _Billowy_.

I nod, biting my lip.

“Will you wear it before we leave?”

_You’ll kill me if you stop._

“If I must,” I mutter but a laugh pops out at the end, slipping through my lips before I have the chance to toss it away, far away from him. His own laugh reciprocates as he gazes at me. He has collected too much of my laughter, much more than any one human being could hold, and yet I still have more for him. I could fill an entire room with my laughter, if it would make him happy. I could fill an entire city, the ocean even. And then I’d fill it all over again, every minute of every day until Saturday, if it might make him stay.

We make it to the shop, drowning in replicas of pieces found in and on the walls behind us, and where Jenny has chosen a postcard with the very same Monet that Oliver had mentioned printed on the back. The elderly woman at the counter adds a stamp and says she will mail it for her, “not a problem, Miss” in too-perfect English.

“Who are you mailing it to?” I ask, feeling guilty for having barely spoken to her all morning. What I would have said, I don’t know.

She hugs her bag to her chest. “Myself. To remind me of the days we had before we must travel back to reality.”

Oliver kisses her temple. “Where shall we go for lunch, Pro? Something with a good lobster tail?”

My father eyes me. Maybe he can feel the heat rising from my shirt collar.

“There’s a place not far—overlooks the lake. _Al Mare_.”

“Fantastic. Jenny?”

She looks up at Oliver and smiles, if only slightly. “Sounds great.”

It begins to feel like these last remaining days will blur into one and I will suddenly have only mere minutes left with Oliver. I’ll be standing on the train station platform, just like last summer, staring at him, willing him not to go, not to look at me with every emotion flashing in his eyes.

_My father told me once that a truth only procures final honesty when told to the one whom you are most afraid to share it with. Sometimes that person is yourself. Are you afraid you will not be the person everyone thinks you are because their version of truth does not match your own? Are you afraid your truth will shock your system into further denial upon actual realization? We are all living with bits of truth we do not care to acknowledge. Our hope should be that we at least understand them, in some way or another, and perhaps someday tell our souls how we really feel. Then the light will shine through, and love will be allowed in again. Be honest with yourself and you can be honest with others. You will love so intentionally that truth will seep from your very pores, and into theirs. Your truth will become theirs. And that is what we are all searching for._

_The Oaths of My Father_ by Elio Perlman. The smattering of words I’d written for him, of him, in him, by him. Every fucking word—and a million more.

I’d write them again if I had to.


	10. Chapter 10

I began memorizing him again.

How his hair caught the sun in the middle of the day, radiating off of him in waves so tangible you didn’t need to touch him to feel his warmth.

How his cheeks dimpled when he laughed—at something I said, or something I did, or because he was Oliver and I was Elio and we would always laugh at each other, even if there was nothing really substantial to laugh about. Even if no one else would ever get it. If I only ever heard his laugh for the rest of my life—a deep cackle that seared your senses—I would be okay.

How his eyes often moved through emotions quickly, as if he feared someone might catch him resting on one for too long. He was shy, covering up parts of him before he realized what parts he was even showing. This wasn’t always the case with me, and yet I knew this about him all too well.

How his fingers turned pages in books, how they handled silverware, how they gestured to that map or those photos or this chair, how they gripped at his hair in every other situation, some sort of safeguard. How they felt on my skin.

_Oliver. Oliver. Oliver._

It felt strange, perhaps a dusting of déjà vu spread over me. As the hours went by, closer and closer to his departure, I would catch myself preparing a mental catalog of everything he did so as not to forget him. But I had never forgotten him before, as much as I should have. I would surely carry his every piece, my every piece, to my grave.

I just knew I’d be sitting in class in the fall and a professor would be talking about astronomy and he’d say, “the stars are more than we will ever know” and I’ll want to disagree.

 _I know the stars_ , I’ll want to say. _I know the stars because I know him_.

Our stars twinkled overhead and inside us no matter the time of day, and I’d gladly sharpen their glow when he sought me out for conversation that could only keep us two.

In the last few days, Jenny spent a lot of time with my mother in the orchard or helping Mafalda in the kitchen because it reminded her of the time she had with her grandmother. Oliver would come find me and we’d talk or not talk, but just being near him for hours on end was some semblance of an enough we would have to be. It hurt with a shockingly dull pain that he wouldn’t touch me for more than a few hasty seconds, and that he’d stare forever at my lips but not touch them to his, always seeming to put us off for later, later, _later_. How many years of later must I wait? I knew the one speck of optimism I had for our later would evaporate once he got on that train with Jenny. Still I held onto it. If only for remembrance.

“Thank you all for welcoming me into your home, and really, into your family. I’m so glad Oliver brought me here to meet the famous Perlmans,” Jenny says now, over dessert on Friday night, less than 24 hours left with Oliver by my side. “I wish we weren’t having to leave early under these circumstances.”

“We’re just happy you were able to enjoy yourself for a little while,” my mother says around her cigarette, blowing smoke into the wind. She rests an arm on the back of Jenny’s chair, a soft smile at her lips. “Maybe you’ll come back someday?”

My mother glances at me, but I have focused the night’s energy on finishing my slice of raspberry cheesecake. I barely make eye contact as she turns back to Jenny. I feel Oliver staring at me, too, and I kick him under the table, lightly, which only makes him stifle a broad grin into his palms.

“I’d love to.” Jenny nods, sucking some raspberry juice from her spoon—much like Oliver. A nerve unhinges in me when I notice him in her, and I duck my head so as not to see any of their faces. Across the table, my father clears his throat and I have no choice but to look up and peer at him through the awkward fog that only I can see.

“You and Oliver are always welcome here,” he says, gesturing around him at the villa, the orchard, the yard, everything that carries fragments of my life but also fragments of Oliver—they are one in the same. That way they’ll always be.

We finish dessert in relative small talk, as if it is their first day here all over again. Jenny has gained back some of her polite laughter around my father’s abysmal anecdotes and Oliver downs his wine lazily, a heady sense of wistfulness settling over us as the evening wears on. The insects buzz in the trees while we chatter uselessly over empty plates and empty wine glasses. My mother’s laugh rings throughout the yard when Jenny tells a story about her mother’s wine cellar, something that sounds very much like the old-money New England-class Oliver had once mentioned, but I know Jenny is not like that.

Sometimes I wish that she were.

Might it be easier, if she were? If she were a terrible person? If she were arrogant, snobby, unappreciative, unintelligent, careless?

No, not entirely. It would be easier to dismiss her, to hate her. But it would not make Oliver leaving with her any easier.

I watch him take Jenny down to the edge of the yard, not far from the riverbank, the moon bouncing off of his hair even at a distance. My parents are still at the table—my father reading over some notes and my mother reading another French romance novel—and I am doing absolutely nothing but staring after them, longing to be in her place, aching for more time. Just one more day, I think. But even a million more days would never truly be enough.

“You okay, _mon fils_?” comes my mother’s voice. She pauses to take a sip of the last remaining dregs of her wine and offers up her hand, summoning me to come sit beside her, facing the house and away from Oliver and Jenny. With a theatrical grunt, I slide into the seat next to her and feel her infectious contentment envelop me as she presses her lips to my hairline and squeezes my shoulder. She rests her head against mine, sighing for the both of us.

“College is going to be good for you, Elio,” my father murmurs, not taking his eyes off of his notes. “You’re going to meet so many bright minds like your own.”

“Can’t wait,” I deadpan. I gulp down the last of her wine.

“Elio.” She rubs my back, like she used to do when I was sick and feigned such exhaustion that she brought my food into my room and let me watch TV with the volume all the way up. “Maybe you shouldn’t go with Anchise to bring them to the station tomorrow, hmm?”

My eyes go wide in a white-hot panic. “ _What_? Of course I’m going.”

“It might be best for you to stay home. Maybe you could go do something with Marzia. See a movie?”

I push away from the table before she can grab my hand, not caring if I look so juvenile that she might even laugh, _don’t be that way, Elio._ But she doesn’t laugh, doesn’t make another sound, so I stalk off in the direction of the front gate. I barely register pulling on my backpack and picking up my bike from the side yard, my mind set on someplace else, somewhere only mine. Somewhere only his, until the end of time, and still beyond that.

The berm is still and quiet when I come upon it, the water sending chills of ripples toward the banks as flies land on the surface. I set up on the edge of the water, book in hand, eyes up to the sky for several seconds. Above me I see the stars begin to take shape, Oliver and I among them. Perhaps he is looking up at these same ones, only a few miles away, and thinking the same thing.

_Every constellation in my sky points to you. You are the North Star, the highest peak, the brightest point. Everywhere I go, I’m guided back to you._

The better half of an hour I spend thinking of the past several days, and of last summer, and of how much we are each other’s despite the outward look of it all. I want to run to him, be pulled into him, whisper in his ear, kiss his jaw, touch his chest. If only I were brave enough to do it all anyway. If only I weren’t moral enough to admit that even if he feels every way for me, he is still engaged and I am not her. I will never be her. I suppose I am destined to only be his love’s entirety fit into one summer, and spread thin for the rest of his years. A memory of a person. The best memory. The only memory, on constant kaleidoscopic repeat. The years will come and go, but I will remain for all of them within his mind’s eye.

I dream of a rustling in the trees, the crunch of gravel mere feet away. I open my eyes onto him, though I see him everywhere I look.

“Oliver?” I say to be sure.

“Your mom sent me to find you,” he says and he is so real that I melt into the earth at the very sound of his breath. I become every layer beneath us so that he may grow forever from inside me.

_From me, you will always be. We exist for each other._

“She doesn’t want me to go with you to the station tomorrow.”

He sits down beside me, absentmindedly turning over my book in his hands. “Mother knows best, huh?”

I dare to smirk at him. “Perhaps the aftermath of last year has her worried.”

His smile disappears and he looks out over the water, taking in the scent that has permeated my being for years, and yet now always reminds me of him. I look for any sign that he might be searching for a reason to drag me back to the villa, but he is stoic and pondering, unmoving to a tee. A statue in modernity.

“I hope you know how much you mean to me,” he says through the silence. “It sounds stupid to say, but I want you to know. I want you to always know.”

His hand rests atop mine and when his fingers curl into mine, I tense up if only because I know in just a few hours time this all will be gone. I already feel myself seeking refuge in solitude, away from the world, but I need him _right now_ and I have no idea how to reconcile what cannot be.

“Are you happy?” I whisper.

_Will you ever be the happy that are you with me, with someone else?_

He closes his eyes. “Happy? With you, Elio, I am much more than that.”

My insides all but crawl out of me to get to him, my limbs shaking. _Oliver, take me with you. I am no use to this fragile body without you._ I punch the grass several times over, trying to think of words, or anything that might give him the impression that I feel the same way and that we can’t just leave all that we have become, suspended in the balance again.

“We should head back,” I mumble finally, letting myself go against the waves crashing around inside me. I feel sick to my stomach, sick to my head, sick to every part of me.

“What’s wrong?” His hand moves to my chin, eyes peering deep into me. “We have time.”

“No, Oliver. We don’t have time—we’ve never had time. Timing has always fucked us over.”

“But not right now—we have right now, Elio. _Please_.”

_Will right now last us the rest of our lives?_

My silence hangs in the air between us for seconds on end, which turn to minutes on end. I stare at the damp overgrown ground. _I don’t want it to last the rest of our lives—I want it to last until I see you again. Because I want to see you again. Please, say we’ll see each other again. I want you every time I wake up and every time I go to sleep. I want you even when I don’t think I do. I always will._

He moves closer and I let him, a farewell touch hindering my decision to get up and walk away. We sit, close but not touching, for minutes more before he senses my fabricated indifference and stretches away from me, yawning for effect.

“Okay. So let’s head back, then, if you are so eager to be rid of me.”

“You know it’s not like that at all,” I say, standing up.

“I know.”

In that instant, _I know_ becomes everything. For so long he didn’t know, or claimed he didn’t, but there it hangs— _I know_.

 _I know, too_ , I want to say. _I know you are for me, and I for you. We have the universe in our grasp and yet the universe casts us away, time and time again. I know you will always be mine, if only under the surface. The dark ebb and flow of a lifetime._

When we get back to the villa, my parents are watching TV, and Jenny is braiding her hair. Oliver’s eyes travel with me as I climb the stairs while he joins her, albeit reluctantly, on the sofa. I would have joined them, too, for any chance to spend more minutes with him before tomorrow, but my heart has deflated to nothing and my eyes are too sore to see anything but the absence of him. It’s almost like they’ve already left—I can’t help but think this way, and I hate it.

On my desk lies the copy of _The Heart’s Valet_ with a note.

_I will never be over you._

I tuck it under my pillow, and sleep finds its way in.

 

We leave for the station much too early, and end up waiting in the car for forty minutes, listening to music that Jenny doesn’t understand but pretends to like for the sake of the rest of us—not that we like it all that much either. The radio in the car has been broken for months and my father thinks it’s hilarious to leave it eternally stuck on this Italian opera channel. Anchise turns it off after awhile.

Ten minutes to the train departure and we are standing on the platform, staring at forever. I am wearing Billowy. Jenny is crying for more reasons than one, and I hug her tightly, allowing myself to cry because she is. She wipes her nose on my shoulder, apologizes, and hugs me again. I force a laugh and tell her “it’s okay, _Americano_.” She smiles, so sweet and natural. I know I will miss her, too, in some ways.

“Well.”

One single word. That’s all Oliver can muster before I fold myself into him and I don’t care anymore. It’s innocent and familial to anyone watching. But inside his cocoon I feel him quivering, too, and I break out another inaudible sob. He holds me until he feels my breathing return to a ragged stage of normalcy before he stands back. His eyes are glassy and all the blues in the world. I fear my own are too attached to his that I will go blind when he turns away.

“Elio,” Jenny says, gulping down more tears. “I’m so happy to have met you. You are the best part of all of Italy.”

“That’s generous,” I say.

Oliver smirks, only halfway. “You’re going to give him a big head, Jen.”

“So be it.” She shrugs. The whistle sounds behind us and she glances back, worry settling into her laugh lines. “I suppose we should board now?”

She pecks me on the cheek one last time, takes my hand and rubs it like it will bring her luck, and picks up her bag—big and round and brown, with purple flower detail. Oliver looks at me with a stare that could go on for years and I’d gladly allow it. But then his hand pats my shoulder—no, grips my shoulder—and he is backing away from me. I watch them mount the steps and disappear inside. I can’t even see them through the windows. I can’t even hear them saying goodbye, one last time.

My world goes black after that. I don’t even remember the drive back home, Anchise muttering to himself about nonexistent traffic. I barely remember meeting my mother at the gate, another hug from someone that isn’t Oliver. I don’t remember how life works without him, though I had been getting by all right not two weeks ago. A life without him doesn’t even seem like a life at all.

“Elio, will you come down here?” my mother calls a few hours later. I see her from my window, sitting on the back patio with my father.

I trudge down the stairs with the ache of all eternity recycling through my muscles. It takes every ounce of worthless energy to drag myself to them, where I lay my head on the table and dribble out sigh after sigh.

“Is it September yet?” I ask. Maybe my father’s words are rubbing off on me—maybe college in another country is the key to curing all heartbreak.

They exchange a look unlike one I’ve seen before and my back tenses— _please don’t tease me now. Please let me sleep for years on end._

“Before we give you this, we have to ask that you trust us and understand that we expect you to gain some perspective and some culture from this,” my father begins, lacing his fingers together over his paper. His glasses slide down his nose like always, and in this moment they look absolutely absurd. “And—well, perhaps I don’t have a speech really prepared for this. It was your mother’s idea—you are more like her than you know, Elio.”

“What’s going on, _Papa_?”

My mother produces an envelop from her lap and slides it across the table to me, her hands clasping mine for a few precious seconds before gesturing to open it. _What insanity have you brought to me now_ , I wonder. Without much regard for their attentive gazes, I rip open the seal and dump out the contents: a single rectangular strip of paper with my name on it, among other words that blur together when I notice the airline at the top. And the words _Milan_ and _New York City_. Everything else crumbles away.

“Is this…”

My mouth has gone dry. I cannot speak. I cannot think. I cannot concentrate.

“The funeral is Monday. Your flight leaves on Wednesday,” she explains, her face warming into a secret smile. “You’ll take the train to the airport, of course. Sound all right?”

“What are you saying? Do you know something I don’t?”

She shakes her head and he nods at the ticket. “Trust us.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” I say because what else do you say when your parents give you a plane ticket to New York City, the very city your Oliver lives, the very city your Oliver is returning to at this very second? What do you fucking say?

“No more questions right now,” my mother adds when I start to open my mouth again.

I have every question in the world, but I also have one definite answer.

It’s not over.


	11. Chapter 11

“I’m going to New York in two days.”

It is a grand announcement, one that still confuses even me, but brings a warm smile to Marzia’s face. I duck my head before she can see the nervous tension in my jaw, overwhelmed by the smile that also threatens to overtake my face. Since yesterday evening I have been in a frenzied state of skeptical enchantment, unsure if I should really be so excited. Though I seem to have nothing to lose as of yet, it seems like whatever this is will be the ultimate answer to my every question since last summer.

“What are you going to say?” she asks. She tucks a curl behind her ear and stares out across the piazza. “To Oliver, I mean.”

“Who says this has anything to do with him?” I reply but I cannot hold a straight face for very long. I sigh into an anxious laugh. “They won’t tell me anything. It’s so _frustrating_. I feel like if he had had something more to say to me, he would’ve said it when he was still here.”

I’m not sure I really believe that, but every doubt I’ve ever had about us has come careening to the forefront of my mind. What else can become of us if I go there and it is still not enough for him to admit his heart to his head?

“Maybe it’s not something he can say.”

I feel my cheeks burning in her gaze and yet, I don’t look away. I want her to be right. I want my mother to know something I don’t. I have to believe my parents giving me a ticket to New York means more than showing up at Oliver and Jenny’s door with lovesick eyes and words that may not be returned. It all seems so surreal, so full of fiction that I have yet to really absorb it entirely into my mind. It’s something of the movies—you don’t often get to fly overseas to reunite with the one whom your heart beats solely for, only days after their parting.

_I’ll never be over you._

His words meant more than anyone’s ever would, and still I had no idea what to expect. Would this all be just so I can purge my Oliver out of my system, to see their Oliver in such prominence, in the comfortable affability of his own home? Would this be a further confirmation of the fact that my Oliver only existed within the throes of my own life, and not the entirety of life itself? Perhaps I am completely delusional in believing what had happened—or not happened—between us these past several days meant we were only for each other. My Oliver. _Elio, Elio, Elio_. My everything. How could he not be?

“ _Oh mon Dieu_ , Elio,” Marzia says now, cocking her head as I sit staring off into the distance—to the spot outside of the bookstore where he had stood with a cigarette and those damned sunglasses, only days before. “You shouldn’t worry so much; it’s like your mom always says.”

I shrug off her gentle pat on my shoulder. “I hate not knowing,” I say, more of a whisper, and more to myself than anyone.

Marzia drops her gaze to the book in her hands, fingering the frayed edges of the cloth hardback. It’s another book of poems—this one she had picked out herself: various works of Charles Baudelaire.

“I think you know,” she murmurs, shaking her head. The curls fall out from behind her ears, hiding her face. “I think he does, too.”

She goes quiet, pretending not to care that I broke her heart once. It’s always there, resting between us. We do not often speak of it.

“ _Je t’aime_ ,” I tell her, and this time I kiss her cheek, run my hand through the length of her hair. My best friend, my virginity’s keeper, my heart’s companion but not its curator. A piece of raw sunshine who would always deserve more, even if I could have given it to her. Still she seeks out my company, and we exist in friendship that could only be molded for us. I will always look to her to be on my side, and perhaps someday I can be on hers with someone else that loves her the way she should be loved.

Her smile is full of pure cane sugar when she catches my hand. “ _Je t’aime_ , Elio,” she says, and her eyes mean it as much as her lips. “Take me home?”

“Eh, I don’t really feel like it.”

I wait for her to smack my shoulder before waving her onto the handlebars of my bike, having picked her up earlier in the day to see a movie, per my mother’s idea. The cinema had been crowded; chalk full of adolescent couples seeing the latest romance. When they had seen Marzia and me, I’m sure they had thought us a saturated, infatuated young couple, too.

When we reach the stretch of gravel that leads to Marzia’s, she hops off and hugs her jacket and her book to her chest, like always. Her eyes betray a certain unadulterated sadness that I know too well.

“ _Grazi_ ,” she says, looking down at the ground.

I stuff my hands in my pockets, a shiver running its discourse through my veins. “Yeah,” is all I say back.

She gambles a quick glance up at me and holds my gaze in hers for several seconds. “I hope everything will work out.”

 _Me too_ , I think, but I don’t say it. Instead I pull her into a hug, resting my head on her back, hoping she doesn’t think I’m absolutely insane to be going to New York, to be interrupting his life. Perhaps, though, it has always been him interrupting mine. And I want nothing more for him to continue doing that—in such rapid, constant succession that it becomes everything I am. Everything he is. Everything we are. For him to be interrupting me at every time of day, every day of the year.

“Well. _Ciao_.”

“ _Ciao_.”

She backs away down the path, staring after me as I climb back onto my bike and wave.

I imagine Oliver calling out to her. _Later_ , he’d say. _I go where he goes._

I smile to myself—so candid, boyish, unprecedented—all the way back to the villa.

 

If the days leading up to his leaving were a blur, the days before seeing him again dragged on as if they were months. Monday I busied myself with transcriptions and swimming down at the river, alone. I found I could barely talk with anyone without wanting to scream out his name—no, my name—or be bothered with any mindless tasks that didn’t, in some way, correlate with my trip to New York. I’d transcribe a song and be reminded of him, or I’d toss a rock across the river and pretend he was there with me. He had always been on mind since last summer, but there was something different in the air now. A sense of hope that actually had foundation in the fact that this trip had to be for a purpose.

Still, I grasped at loose straws when it came to Jenny. What wasn’t my mother telling me? A sinking feeling overtook me when I thought of her freckles, her sweetness, her innocent taste in life. I didn’t want to hurt her—but Oliver had done that a long time ago in asking her to marry him. I had never claimed that he was perfect, or that he didn’t hurt people, whether he meant to or not. However imperfect he was—he was mine to hate, mine to endure, mine to understand. I’d take his flaws and I’d wrap them up in me so that our flaws were one, and I’d live with them forever. He wasn’t _la movie star_ to me, some faultless dream of a person who could do no wrong. He was me as I was him, and I was no more perfect than he.

When Wednesday morning finally comes, when Anchise and my parents drop me off at the train station, when I am sitting alone in the plane, staring off into the white abyss outside my window—I allow myself to breathe. My mind runs rampant with thoughts of him, but I can breathe knowing I’ll be seeing him again so soon. I start to replay my parents’ words back as they had sent me off, just two short hours ago.

My mother’s _Call when you get there. We love you very much, mon trésor_.

My father’s _Don’t forget to stop by Goddard’s office at NYU before you come back—he’ll be happy to see you. Give him my best._ Followed rather hastily by him thrusting a piece of paper into my hands, his smile reaching the edges of his glasses.

An address in Westchester, about an hour outside of Manhattan. Written in girly, loopy handwriting—Jenny’s.

Will he be waiting for me? Does he know I’m coming? Is this not only a secret kept from me, but a secret kept from him, too? What does any of this mean?

It is these questions and a dozen more than send me into the sleep that I had gotten none of the night before. I am nudged awake, seven hours later, by a woman with the airline, smiling down at me with hands clasped.

“We have arrived in New York City,” she announces. “Would you like me to help you get your bag?”

“I’m okay, thanks,” I tell her as a deep blush overtakes me. I struggle to unbuckle my seatbelt— _goddammit, Elio, pull yourself together_ —as she plucks my backpack from the above carriage anyway. I notice I am the last one left on the plane and offer her a sheepish look as I bow out from my seat and take the bag from her.

“Have a nice stay,” she says.

“I will,” I say, and I believe it.

JFK is busy for 11 a.m. and I make quick work of finding baggage claim and grabbing my small suitcase that held too much for only a few days. But these few days could be the most important of my life, so I had over packed, filling the case with books and cassettes, even a box of shortbread cookies Oliver liked that my mother ordered from Belgium. As I pass by a newsstand, I buy a magazine he had mentioned once. Maybe we could discuss one of the articles, argue over this line or that quote, and highlight the best passages.

 _The use of simile here is great, but pretty unconvincing. It’s not anything all that special. I should know,_ I’d say, drinking coffee from his mug.

 _That’s the whole point_ , he’d muse with his hand on my leg and his eyes on my lips. _Read it again, smartass._

Outside, it is cooler than back home and I feel goosebumps awaken my core. The air smells like cheap cigarettes and I am nervous, more nervous than I’ve ever been, so I bum one from a skinny blonde girl sitting on the bench beside me, wearing headphones that are vibrating with Duran Duran. It’s Jenny’s song—I feel my nerves relax into the American atmosphere of a Wednesday morning like any other to everyone else. I bask in the comfort of the airport drop-off, smoking a cigarette I don’t need, for minutes on end. Finally, the anxiety returning, I force myself to hail a taxi and count the money my parents had given me to be sure it will be enough.

“Westchester,” I say to the cab driver, handing over Oliver and Jenny’s address. He nods as if memorizing the street name and number, and pushes it back into my clammy grasp.

“Forty-five minutes, tops,” he answers as he pulls out of the airport. “Nice part of town. You got family there?”

My throat seizes at the word. I close my eyes and breathe again, feel his fingers on my skin again, feel his blood in my veins, feel his lips on my lips, feel his everything inside me. I have always been Elio, but I have never been more Oliver. My Oliver. My entire humanity fleshed out onto his canvas.

_Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio._

“Yes,” I tell him.

_M_ _y brother_ _,_ _my_ _friend, my husband, my lover, myself._

How did I get this way? Was I created entirely for him, and him for me? For his skin only calls for mine, and mine only gives to his. For his eyes always search for me, for my eyes only truly see in his gaze. For his heart pulses at a frequency only I can hear, for mine echoes it back all the same. As the minutes go by, my chest beats so loudly I’m sure he can hear it. I’m sure he’s closing his eyes and mouthing _Oliver_ to the sky like an omen.

 _He’s better than me_ , I had told my father last year. And he is. He’s everything I can put words to, and beyond that. But he is human. We are made for destruction, by ourselves or otherwise. We are borne for the battles that rage on inside ourselves that sometimes dribble out onto those around us. We have never been able to help it; that’s why heartbreak is not just a concept—it is proof of survival, of years to come.

 _Be my every year to come, Oliver_. _You have broken me in ways no one else will repair—no one but you. Piece me back together so that I reflect only you, and you only me._

American time is fast and there’s never enough of it; I had learned that years ago. It floods my senses once more as we reach their address and I realize I still have no words to say. I have every thought—and yet none of them are right. Everything I had gone over on the ride to the suburbs leaves me as I hand the driver my money and stand at the foot of their driveway.

 _Americano_ , I think. That’s what I’ll say.

 _Fucking idiot_ , I think next. _You come all this way with only a played out joke and your nervous, sweaty palms? Fucking idiot._

“If you need a ride back to the airport,” I hear the cabdriver call through the window, leaning across the seat, “call me.” He hands me a card and I take it in a daze, turning back to the house, so unassuming, which summons me with mirages of my Oliver.

Somehow, my feet propel me up the steps to a tall oak door. There is a wicker chair beside it, a paisley-patterned cushion in its seat. I immediately picture Oliver sitting in it, his large frame engulfing it.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I ring the doorbell with only the idea that his face would greet me the sooner I did so. I am a weak collection of bones and jitters as I wait, almost too much to stand. I consider sitting on the chair for half a second when I hear the latch unlock from the inside.

“Oh my God, _you came_.”

It is Jenny, and I all but fall apart in her carefully crafted sphere of comfort. Maybe all along I’d been hoping it would be her. Maybe it has to happen this way.

“I was so worried you wouldn’t come. I didn’t know if your parents would really go along with it. But I think your mom and me—we’re one in the same,” she says in a rush, grabbing me into an embrace that could last me years if I let it. She finally pulls away and ushers me into a living area—Oliver’s books are everywhere and I feel like I’ll lose my breath at everything I look at so I concentrate on only her. Even that is too much.

“What… I don’t know where to—” I try but my lips no longer work. I am numb in every part of me, buzzing with what she’s trying to tell me but that I can barely understand.

She grabs my hands and squeezes, doesn’t let go. “Elio,” she whispers and she’s crying. Jesus Christ, she’s crying so much.

“Tell me. Please tell me,” I manage to say.

“The way he talked about last summer…” she begins, shaking away tears. “I figured there was something else. _Someone_ else. At first I was angry, figuring of course it was another girl. But then he would talk about you… The way he talked about you, my _God_! I knew it could only be you. I’m not even jealous, not really. He adores you, Elio. More than that. So much more than that.

“So it was me who suggested the trip. I wanted to see who he was so in love with, because I truly wanted him to be happy. He tries to love me—he really does. I appreciate him so very much. It’s sick, how the world is. How his family is. How much he has to hide himself, even from me. I’ve known him for seven years, but I know you know him better than anyone. As soon as he came back from Italy, something was different about him. I know he belongs to you. In a crazy way, I think he always has.”

Words, thoughts, daydreams—everything escapes me. I know my eyes are wide and they are filling with their own tears of every conversation we’d had. Of every moment she knew.

“Maybe a part of me was selfish for not saying anything while we were there, but honestly, I thought he wouldn’t be able to handle it. Being back, seeing you. I thought he’d say something—I thought he’d tell me. It was so obvious, you know? I hope you don’t mind me saying so. And I know it must’ve been hell for you, having him leave again. I was going to do something—but with my grandmother, well, everything didn’t work out. Please don’t hate me for bringing Oliver back with me—he’s all I’ve ever really known, and I couldn’t go alone. At the funeral, I felt silly introducing him as my fiancé—because I knew he was much more yours than he had ever been mine. I hope you understand that I needed him, just this one last time.”

She clears her throat and sits back, watching me. Her eyes have become splotchy red rings and her mouth hangs open as if at any moment she will let out a prolonged wail of every emotion that has bubbled to the surface. How long had she been waiting to finally say all of that? How long had she, too, been living Oliver’s lie? My heart crumples again when she reaches out to smooth her hand over my hair.

“Are you mad? Please say something,” she says, wiping her nose on the back of her other hand.

 _I don’t know what to say._ And I tell her that.

She wraps me into her again, her breathing off. My breathing off. My entire world as I know it off.

“Where is he?” It is the most I can ask without dissolving into the carpet, a puddle of Elio-colored muck seeping into the fibers of a life I know too well and yet still do not have, not yet. She has said all this but—but what about him? What does any of this matter without him? Though I know it matters, much more than I can comprehend in this surreal moment in American time. Come tomorrow, this moment will have vanished into the void. I must keep these moments forever. I need to remember how I feel as she watches me watching her, as she’s unfurled her secrets to me. As she assures me he should be home soon. That he has no idea.

 _You’re so special_ , she is telling me, now with a cup of cold coffee in her hands. _He is lucky to know you in a way no one else can. You are the sea, and he is the sun. You will always complement each other; you will always exist because of the other, no matter where you are._

The tears come with a silent heave that launches me back into her arms. I am pathetic and eighteen-years-old in the most cliché way—I love him in the ways she says, and in the ways she doesn’t say. He has always been the only one to do this to me. I know she knows this. And she has always known this.

Does he know this? Yes, of course.

Eight minutes pass. He knows this better than he knows his own name as the front door opens and his footsteps trod over hardwood, just beyond the wall behind me. I recognize his long stride, of heavy footsteps far apart—how often I had met that gait, despite how much taller than me he was.

_Because I am you, Oliver._

“Oliver,” Jenny calls. She looks at me and she has no idea that name is for me.

He enters the room with sweaty, floppy hair—the hair of summer and the hair of my every thought. Glistening skin, short jersey shorts, no shirt— _please never wear a shirt—_ and white tennis shoes I’ve never seen before at his feet. A towel hangs around his shoulders and a Walkman is clipped to his waistband, the headphones dangling from his fingers. _Gone for a run_ , his face says before landing on mine.

His knees buckle at the sight of me and he catches himself on the armrest of the chair to his right, eyes scanning every inch of me. There are the emotions flashing across his face and he cannot choose when he asks, in a voice so quiet I almost don’t hear it:

“Have you come for me?”

I nod.

He glances at Jenny. She says, _It’s okay, Oliver._ _I know._

And that’s all it takes. She leaves the room to just us two and she is the best person I will ever know. I want to thank her a million times over. I want to hug her, kiss her, ask her to always be around.

 _Later_ , I think. _Later_ I will do just that.

Right now I will do this: I will smile at him with every star in his sky bursting into oblivion, shattering whatever fragile shell I had struggled to build around me. I will listen to him say, _You’re crazy—you know that, right? What am I going to do with you?_ And I will say _I don’t know. Do something quick before I leave again—or wait, maybe that’s your thing._ He will laugh, and I will close my eyes and remember the taste of him at the back of my throat.

“ _Oliver_ ,” he finally whispers into my mouth, and I don’t have to remember anymore.

“ _Elio_.”

“I know,” he murmurs and his smile dips forward and dissolves into mine. His lips are mine, and his hands are mine, and his every pore is mine. All of him. All of me. We exist in a state of unbothered abandon. I am him—here, there, now, tomorrow, next week, next year, fifty years—and later still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of your support. I am so humbled by all of your words, and for being apart of this amazing fandom. It really has been a privilege to write and share this with all of you! Elio x Oliver forever, xx
> 
> ALSO, an epilogue may be coming in the near future, if you guys would be interested in reading one :)  
> ***EDIT: This is the end of this fic BUT I am working on a new fic that will be a continuation of this one, so stay tuned :)


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